executions was forbidden. The Revolution dealt what was practically a deathblow to the order, for, though revived in 1804, it provoked ridicule as out of keeping with modern ideas. The Ostension procession of 1862 saw the six surviving lodges parade together for the last time. The events of 1870-71 finished the work of disorganization, and to-day the costumes and ornaments of the Penitents Noirs--who, it seems, had survived all the others--remain as curiosities in the possession of the last treasurer of the lodge. The stranger at Limoges is perforce an early riser. He is aroused from his slumbers at daybreak by a furious reveille of drum and bugle from the numerous barracks about the city, and from that time on bugle-practice and drum-practice hold high revel, until the despairing visitor is obliged, in sheer self-defence, to rise, dress and stroll out to see where all the racket comes from. He will understand it when he learns that of the seventy thousand people in the city about him, ten thousand are soldiers. If he would gain some idea of the number and extent of the _casernes_ in which this good-sized army is quartered--in fact, if he would have a view of the whole city just awakening to its daily life--let him stroll up through one or another of the steep streets leading to the Place d'Orsay, a hilltop park crowned with forest trees and overlooking all Limoges. There was once a Roman arena on this spot, but its memory now lives only in the name of an adjacent street. If the morning be clear the view from this point is superb. Let the spectator turn where he may, he looks over densely-crowded housetops toward a vast amphitheatre of surrounding hills dotted with châteaux and farms, and enclosing the circular valley or basin in the centre of which, upon a knoll, stands the city itself. About him the busy hum of toil is already audible. Scores of tall chimneys puffing out smoke and flames mark the numerous porcelain-factories scattered here and there through the city's limits. Close at hand the tapering spire of St. Michael's, and beyond it that of St. Pierre, stand out in clear relief against the morning sky, while farther in the distance the cathedral looms up grand and shapely among the morning shadows rising from the river at its base.