The top at last! We seemed to be among the clouds. Far below us lay the great shining city, spreading away into distance; and although it was night, the light of a full moon and untold thousands of lamps in the streets and buildings below enabled us easily to pick out the great thoroughfares and the more familiar structures. There was the Opéra, there the Panthéon, there Notre-Dame, there St.-Sulpice, there the Invalides, and, uplifted to emulate the eminence on which we stood, the Tour Eiffel, its revolving searchlight at the apex shining like an immense meteor or comet with its misty trail stretching out over the city. The roar of life faintly reached our ears from the vast throbbing plain, where millions of human mysteries were acting out their tragedies. The scene was vast, wonderful, entrancing. Far above us still a maze of rafters, beams, and scaffolding fretted the sky,--the skeleton of that beautiful but unfinished Church of the Sacré- Cour, crowning the very summit of Montmartre. There seemed to be no life here, for not a soul did we meet, and not a light shone except that of the moon. Bishop guided me through a maze of steep stony passages, between the walls of dark gardens, turning now to the right, again to the left, through archways and courts; and I wondered how he could remember them all. Before I could fully comprehend our position we were confronted by two black, gaunt, uncanny objects with long outstretched arms that cut across the sky like giant skeleton sentinels forbidding our farther advance. But the sounds of lively music and the glow of rows of white-globed lamps quickly banished the illusion and advertised the fact that we were in a very material and sensual world, for they announced the Moulin de la Galette at the foot of the passage. The spectres against the sky were only very, very old windmills, relics of the time, three centuries gone, when windmills crowded the summit of Montmartre to catch all the winds that blew. Now they stand, stark, dead, silent, and decaying; their stately revolutions are no more; and the skeleton frames of their fans look down on a marvellous contrast, the intensely real life of the Galette. [Illustration: 0234]