I cannot refrain from here making answer to a remark too often heard from American lips, that America is as immoral as France--that American society is every whit as depraved as the French. It is _not_. The immorality of America is as a festering wound on an otherwise healthy body: the immorality of France is like a scrofulous taint that poisons the whole life-current. One gets weary and heartsick with the old eternal song, the everlasting theme, which is sung and told and dramatized and written about and painted--that flies in your face at every corner and stares up at you from every inch of printed paper, every square of colored canvas, in the whole nationality. And to sum up at last this, "a woman's opinion," I will freely state that the longer I live in France the more I admire the Parisians and the less I like them. L.H.H. THE COLLEGIO ROMANO. The Collegio Romano was always worth a visit, because it contained the celebrated Kircherian Museum and the admirable observatory presided over by Father Secchi, the world-celebrated astronomer. But these are matters sufficiently treated of by the guide-books, and may be left to them. Of the story of the enormous building they have less to tell, though there is much of curious interest to be told. But neither is that my object on the present occasion. My purpose is to speak of the strangely-changed fortunes and destinies of the old historic pile, and of what it now is and is to be. But little in Rome, as we all know, has remained unchanged in these strange latter days. But few things--at least few material things--have experienced such a change as the Collegio Romano. The "Collegio Romano" was in fact nothing more than the principal convent of the Jesuits. The establishment was founded immediately after the institution of the order, and mainly by the care and energy of Saint Francisco Borgia, the third general of the order. The present building, however, was raised in the pontificate of Gregory XIII. by the Florentine architect Ammanati, the first stone having been laid in 1582. It is an enormous mass of building--enormous even among the huge structures for which Rome above all other cities is remarkable--situated near the church of the Gesù and not far from the Piazza di Venezia. There is nothing remarkable in its outward appearance save the vast size, the object of the builders having evidently been only to adapt it in a business-like way to the purposes to which it was destined. These included not only the provision of a residence for the fathers of the order resident in Rome, and for the all-but all-powerful general of the terrible order--the "Black Pope," as the Romans were wont to call him--but also all the _locale_ necessary for a very large educational establishment, whence the building took its name.