Of the town of Paris that is so lamentably notable in these days I have but the recollection that one takes away from a new scene witnessed under stress of mind due to matters more immediately affecting him than the colour, shape, and properties of things seen, and the thought I had in certain parts of it is more clear to me to-day than the vision of the place itself. It is, in my mind, like a fog that the bridges thundered as our coach drove over them with our wretched fortunes on that early morning of our escape from Bicêtre, but as clear as when it sprung to me from the uproar of the wheels comes back the dread that the whole of this community would be at their windows looking out to see what folks untimeously disturbed their rest. We were delayed briefly at a gate upon the walls; I can scarcely mind what manner of men they were that stopped us and thrust a lantern in our faces, and what they asked eludes me altogether, but I mind distinctly how I gasped relief when we were permitted to roll on. Blurred, too--no better than the surplusage of dreams, is my first picture of the river and its isles in the dawn, but, like a favourite song, I mind the gluck of waters on the quays and that they made me think of Earn and Cart and Clyde. We stopped in the place of the Notre Dame at the corner of a street; the coach drove off to a _remise_ whence it had come, and we went to an hospital called the Hôtel Dieu, in the neighbourhood, where Hamilton had a Jesuit friend in one of the heads, and where we were accommodated in a room that was generally set aside for clergymen. It was a place of the most wonderful surroundings, this Hôtel Dieu, choked, as it were, among towers, the greatest of them those of Our Lady itself that were in the Gothic taste, regarding which Father Hamilton used to say, “_Dire gothique, c'est dire mauvais gout_,” though, to tell the truth, I thought the building pretty braw myself. Alleys and wynds were round about us, and so narrow that the sky one saw between them was but a ribbon by day, while at night they seemed no better than ravines.