Here there was an unbounded wilderness of desolation and solitude. The black Seine flowed silently past dark masses that were resolved into big canal-boats, with their sickly green lights reflected in the writhing ink of the river. Notre-Dame now pushed its massive bulk through the fog, but its towers were lost in the sky. Near by a few dim lights shone forth through the slatted windows of the Morgue. But its lights never go out. And how significantly close to the river it stands! Peering under the arches of the bridges, we found some of the social dregs that sleep there with the rats. It was not difficult to imagine the pretty girl in black whom we had passed coming at last through dissipation and wrinkles and broken health to take refuge with the rats under the bridges, and it is a short step thence to the black waters of the river; and that the scheme of the tragedy might be perfect in all its parts, adjustments, and relations, behold the Morgue so near, with its lights that never go out, and boatmen so skilled in dragging the river! And the old man who was gathering the refuse and waste of smokers, it was not impossible that he should find himself taking this route when his joints had grown stiffer, though it would more likely end under the bridges. The streets are very narrow and crooked around Notre-Dame, and their emanations are as various as the capacity of the human nose for evil odors. The lamps, stuck into the walls of the houses, only make the terrors of such a night more formidable; for while one may feel a certain security in absolute darkness, the shadows to which the lamps lend life have a baffling elusiveness and weirdness, and a habit of movement that makes one instinctively dodge. But that is all the trick of the wind. However that may be, it is wonderful how much more vividly one remembers on such a night the stories of the murders, suicides, and other crimes that lend a particular grewsomeness to the vicinity of the Morgue and Notre-Dame. We again turned to the right, into a narrow, dirty street,--the Rue du Haut-Pavé,--whose windings brought us into a similar street,--the Rue Galande. Bishop halted in front of a low arched door-way, which blazed sombrely in its coat of blood-red paint. A twisted gas-lamp, demoralized and askew, depended overhead, and upon the glass enclosing it was painted, with artistic flourishes,--"Au Soleil d'Or." This was the cabaret of the Golden Sun,--all unconscious of the mockery of its name, another of those whimsical disjointings in which the shadowy side of Paris is so prolific. From the interior of the luminary came faintly the notes of a song, with piano accompaniment.