on the panel of wonderful embroidery, were two angels supporting the brilliant coat of arms of Hautecœur. Then the solemn service began. All the clergy connected with the cathedral were present to do honour to their Bishop, and priests had come from the different parishes to assist them. Among the crowd of white surplices which seemed to overflow the grating, shone the golden capes of the choristers, and the red robes of the singing-boys. The almost eternal night of the side-aisles, crushed down by the weight of the heavy Romanesque chapels, was this morning slightly brightened by the limpid April sunlight, which struck the painted glass of the windows so that they seemed to be a burning of gems, a sacred bursting into blossom of luminous flowers. But the background of the nave particularly blazed with a swarming of wax-tapers, tapers as innumerable as the stars of evening in a summer sky. In the centre, the high altar seemed on fire from them, a true “burning bush,” symbolic of the flame that consumes souls; and there were also candles in large candelabra and in chandeliers, while before the plighted couple, two enormous lustres with round branches looked like two suns. About them was a garden of masses of green plants and of living blossoms, where were in flower great tufts of white azaleas, of white camellias, and of lilacs. Away to the back of the apse sparkled bits of gold and silver, half-seen skirts of velvet and of silk, a distant dazzling of the tabernacle among the sombre surroundings of green verdure. Above all this burning the nave sprang out, and the four enormous pillars of the transept mounted upward to support the arched vaulting, in the trembling movement of these myriads of little flames, which almost seemed to pale at times in the full daylight which entered by the high Gothic windows.