Our first expedition was to the banker's and to the shops, and having replenished our purse and wardrobe, we were prepared to besiege the city. There was a day or two of rest in the gilded chairs, cushioned with blue satin, of our pretty _salon_, whence we peeped down upon the street below between the yellow satin curtains that draped its wide French window; or rolled our eyes meditatively to the delicately tinted ceiling, with its rose-colored clouds skimmed by tiny, impossible birds; or made abortive attempts to penetrate the secrets of the buhl cabinets, and to guess at the time from the pretty clocks of disordered organism; or admired ourselves in the mirrors which gazed at each other from morning till night, for our apartments in the little Hotel Friedland we found most charming. You will hardly care for a description of the dozen, more or less, churches, old, new, and restored, with which we began and ended our sight-seeing in Paris, where we looked upon sculptured saints without number, and studied ecclesiastical architecture to more than our hearts' content. There was St. Germain L'Auxerrois, the wicked old bell of which tolled the signal for the massacre of St. Bartholomew. We stood with the _bonnes_ and babies under the trees of the square before it, gazing up at the belfry with most severe countenances,--and learned, afterwards, that the bell had been long since removed! There was the Madeleine of more recent date, built in the form of a Greek temple, and interesting just now for having been the church of Father Hyacinthe, to which we could for a time find no entrance. We shook the iron gate; we inquired in excellent English of a French shopkeeper, and found at last an open gateway, a little unlocked door, beyond which we spent a time of search and inquiry in darkness, and among wood, and shavings, and broken chairs, and holy dust-pans, before passing around and entering the great bronze doors. There were the Pantheon and St. Sulpice, grand and beautiful, erected piously from the proceeds of lotteries. There was St. Etienne du Mont, and within one of its chapels the gilded tomb of the patron saint of Paris--St. Genevieve. Who she was, or what she did to gain this rather unenviable position, I failed to learn. Her name seems to have outlived her deeds. Whether she was beautiful and beloved, and put away earthly vanities for a holy life, or old and ugly, and bore her lot with a patience that won saintship, I do not know. I can only tell that tapers burn always upon her tomb, and if you buy one it will burn a prayer for you. So we were told. There is one old church, St. Germain des Prés, most beautifully colored within. Its pictures seem to have melted upon the walls. But admired above all is the Sainte Chapelle, in the Palais de Justice, a chapel fitted up by the fanatical St. Louis, when this palace of justice, which holds now the courts of law, was a royal residence. Of course all its brightness was dimmed long ago. Its