character were so free from self-consciousness or pretension--never one who looked to me so capable of the calm, lofty, unconquerable heroism of a martyr. * * * * * "Paris is the centre of the world," if centripetal tendency is any proof of it. Everything struck off from the other parts of the universe flies straight to the _Palais Royal_. You may meet in its thronged galleries, in the course of an hour, representatives of every creed, rank, nation, and system, under heaven. Hussein Pacha and Don Pedro pace daily the same _pavé_--the one brooding on a kingdom lost, the other on the throne he hopes to win; the Polish general and the proscribed Spaniard, the exiled Italian conspirator, the contemptuous Turk, the well-dressed negro from Hayti, and the silk-robed Persian, revolve by the hour together around the same _jet d'eau_, and costumes of every cut and order, mustaches and beards of every degree of ferocity and oddity, press so fast and thick upon the eye that one forgets to be astonished. There are no such things as "lions" in Paris. The extraordinary persons outnumber the ordinary. Every other man you meet would keep a small town in a ferment for a month. * * * * * I spent yesterday at _Pére la Chaise_, and to day at _Versailles_. The two places are in opposite environs, and of very opposite characters--one certainly making you in love with life, the other almost as certainly with death. One could wander for ever in the wilderness of art at Versailles, and it must be a restless ghost that could not content itself with _Pére la Chaise_ for its elysium.