Toulouse is one of the most important university centers of France, and bears with credit the proud title of "the learned city." With two distinguished members of the faculty, the late Dr.Nicholas Joly and Professor Moliner of the law school, I often had most interesting discussions on all the great questions of the hour.

That three heretics--I should say, six, for my daughter, son, and his wife often joined the circle--could thus sit in perfect security, and debate, in the most unorthodox fashion, in these holy precincts, all the reforms, social, political, and religious, which the United States and France need in order to be in harmony with the spirit of the age, was a striking proof of the progress the world has made in freedom of speech.

The time was when such acts would have cost us our lives, even if we had been caught expressing our heresies in the seclusion of our own homes.

But here, under the oaks of a Catholic convent, with the gray-robed sisters all around us, we could point out the fallacies of Romanism itself, without fear or trembling.

Glorious Nineteenth Century, what conquests are thine! I shall say nothing of the picturesque streets of antique Toulouse; nothing of the priests, who swarm like children in an English town; nothing of the beautifully carved stone facades of the ancient mansions, once inhabited by the nobility of Languedoc, but now given up to trade and commerce; nothing of the lofty brick cathedrals, whose exteriors remind one of London and whose interiors transfer you to "the gorgeous East"; nothing of the Capitol, with its gallery rich in busts of the celebrated sons of the South; nothing of the museum, the public garden, and the broad river winding through all.