These battered and broken-nosed old fellows saw many and many a cavalcade of mail-clad knights come marching home from Holy Land; they heard the bells above them toll the signal for the St.Bartholomew's Massacre, and they saw the slaughter that followed; later they saw the Reign of Terror, the carnage of the Revolution, the overthrow of a king, the coronation of two Napoleons, the christening of the young prince that lords it over a regiment of servants in the Tuileries to-day--and they may possibly continue to stand there until they see the Napoleon dynasty swept away and the banners of a great republic floating above its ruins.

I wish these old parties could speak.

They could tell a tale worth the listening to.
They say that a pagan temple stood where Notre Dame now stands, in the old Roman days, eighteen or twenty centuries ago--remains of it are still preserved in Paris; and that a Christian church took its place about A.D.
300; another took the place of that in A.D.

500; and that the foundations of the present cathedral were laid about A.D.1100.

The ground ought to be measurably sacred by this time, one would think.