The lessee of an extensive 'hotel' had reason to believe that a child had entered and left the world in one of his tenants' apartments, without the cognizance of a human being except the mother; and, aware, as a landlord in Paris should be, of his responsibility to the municipal government, he communicated his suspicions to the authorities. The rooms were searched, the charge denied, and no proof elicited to warrant further action; and here the matter would have ended in any other country. But the police agent entrusted with the inquiry raked over the contents of a pigsty in the courtyard, and discovered a square inch of thin bone, which he exhibited to an anatomist, who pronounced it a fragment of a new-born infant's skull; the hogs were instantly killed, the contents of their stomachs examined, and small portions of the body found. The question then arose whether the child was born alive; pieces of the lungs were placed in a basin of water, and the fact that they floated on its surface proved, beyond a doubt, that the child had breathed; the crime of infanticide was then charged upon the unhappy mother, who, appalled by this evidence of her guilt, confessed. In the gray of the dawn a watchful observer may behold the two extremes of Paris life ominously hinted;--a cloaked figure stealthily dropping a swathed effigy of humanity, just 'sent into this breathing world,' in the rotary cradle of the asylum for _enfants trouvés_, and a cart full of the corpses of the poor, driven into the yard of a hospital for dissection.