A great conflagration devastated Limoges in 1865, but it proved to that city what our political economists would have us believe the national debt has been to the United States--a blessing in disguise. Incident to the rebuilding of the burnt quarter a spirit of general renovation seems to have crept over the minds of the city fathers, and from that time to the present the work of tearing down old buildings and widening or straightening narrow or crooked streets has been pushed forward to such a degree that were some Limousin Rip Van Winkle, after a twenty years' slumber in the adjacent mountains, to happen in suddenly upon the haunts of his childhood, he would open his eyes as wide as did his Knickerbocker namesake. But there are some things that no amount of outlay or engineering can accomplish; and though many costly improvements have been made in modernizing Limoges and bringing it up to a realizing sense of its dignity as the great porcelain-manufacturing city of Europe, there are yet within its walls some streets so crooked that nothing short of total demolition will ever straighten them, and others so steep and rocky that enough nitro-glycerine to shake down a hundred neighboring houses would have to be employed to level them. So it has come to be acknowledged that, with all the goodwill in the world for putting on modern airs, there are tumble-down, straggling, rickety relics of the past in Limoges which no amount of municipal resolutions or appropriations--nothing, in fact, but an earthquake--can ever remove. Every lover of the antique and quaint will fervently pray that no such disaster may ever come to efface the curious reminders of a time gone by. For they are the pages upon which successive centuries have left their imprints. Here, for instance, is a street called the Rue du Consulat. By a happy coincidence, the United States consular office fronts upon it, but let not the patriotic American flatter himself that the street thence derives its name. Here lived one of the Roman proconsuls, and here stood the building in which the governors of the city, formerly known as "consuls," held their sessions. In this simple fact we discover a suggestion of the impress left by the domination of the Romans. But on their heels, in turn, came the Visigoths; then Clovis, who made Limoges one of his first conquests; and then the Saracens, who barely set foot on the soil ere Charles Martel's victory at Poitiers compelled them to leave. Some fragmentary bands, however, remained in the province, and one of them founded the neighboring city of Eymontiers, where buildings of Arabic architecture are still standing.