But walking one day in the fields about the city, I stumbled over a fragment of broken masonry, and lo! the World's Mistress in her stone girdle--alta maenia Romae--rose before me and whitened my cheek with her pale shadow as never before or since.
I used very often, when coming home from my morning's work at one of the public institutions of Paris, to stop in at the dear old church of St.Etienne du Mont.

The tomb of St.Genevieve, surrounded by burning candles and votive tablets, was there; the mural tablet of Jacobus Benignus Winslow was there; there was a noble organ with carved figures; the pulpit was borne on the oaken shoulders of a stooping Samson; and there was a marvellous staircase like a coil of lace.

These things I mention from memory, but not all of them together impressed me so much as an inscription on a small slab of marble fixed in one of the walls.

It told how this church of St.Stephen was repaired and beautified in the year 16**, and how, during the celebration of its reopening, two girls of the parish (filles de la paroisse) fell from the gallery, carrying a part of the balustrade with them, to the pavement, but by a miracle escaped uninjured.

Two young girls, nameless, but real presences to my imagination, as much as when they came fluttering down on the tiles with a cry that outscreamed the sharpest treble in the Te Deum.