oyster-boats in the river almost flapped against
the windows, or of the church where the railroad
made the bells hum as the train rushed by
above the roof, I recal a curious experience.
On summer Sundays, in the gentle rain or the
bright sunshine—either, deepening the idleness
of the idle City—I have sat, in that singular
silence which belongs to resting-places usually
astir, in scores of buildings at the heart of the
world's metropolis, unknown to far greater
numbers of people speaking the English tongue,
than the ancient edifices of the Eternal City, or
the Pyramids of Egypt. The dark vestries and
registries into which I have peeped, and the
little hemmed-in churchyards that have echoed
to my feet, have left impressions on my memory
as distinct and quaint as any it has in that way
received. In all those dusty registers that the
worms are eating, there is not a line but made
some hearts leap, or some tears flow, in their
day. Still and dry now, still and dry! and the
old tree at the window with no room for its
branches, has seen them all out. So with the
tomb of the old Master of the old Company, on
which it drips. His son restored it and died,
his daughter restored it and died, and then he
had been remembered long enough, and the tree
took possession of him, and his name cracked
out.

There are few more striking indications of the
changes of manners and customs that two or three
hundred years have brought about, than these
deserted Churches. Many of them are handsome
and costly structures, several of them were
designed by WREN, many of them arose from the
ashes of the great fire, others of them outlived
the plague and the fire too, to die a slow death
in these later days. No one can be sure of the
coming time; but it is not too much to say of it
that it has no sign in its outsetting tides, of the
reflux to these churches of their congregations
and uses. They remain, like the tombs of the
old citizens who lie beneath them and around
them, Monuments of another age. They are
worth a Sunday-exploration now and then, for
they yet echo, not unharmoniously, to the time
when the city of London really was London;
when the 'Prentices and Trained Bands were of
mark in the state; when even the Lord Mayor
himself was a Reality—not a Fiction
conventionally be-puffed on one day in the year by
illustrious friends, who no less conventionally
laugh at him on the remaining three hundred and
sixty-four days.

THIRTY-TWO DUELS.

ONE Sunday morning (so we learn from a
careful perusal of the biography of Jean Gigon,
as related by Antoine Gandon), a pair of
gendarmes (who always hunt in couples) were returning
from an official round, by an anonymous highway
in the south of France, towards an anonymous
small town, when they heard pitiful sounds
proceeding from a ditch. The utterer of the
plaintive cries turned out to be a fine baby boy,
some six months old, wrapped in a scrap of
coarse blanketing. There was not the slightest
material token left by which the foundling could
hereafter be identified. As this is not a
melodramatic sketch, it may be as well to state that
he never was identified. The humane gendarmes
carried the infant to their anonymous mayor,
offering to stand godfathers to the little stranger.
The brigadier of this patrol was named Jean;
his subordinate, Gigon: therefore the new-come
citizen was inscribed on the registers as "Jean
Gigon, born of unknown father and mother, and
found on the highway, the 15th of September,
1800." In default of any future claim (which
was never preferred), this simple ceremony
converted the probable offspring of some vagabond
gipsy into an additional French subject—a
welcome present, considering that, at that time of
day, there was a tolerable consumption of the
article.

Good Gendarme Gigon did more; he took the
infant home, and with his wife's willing and
hearty consent, brought him up as his own
child, treating him in every way on the same
footing as his own little infant daughter
Marie. On inspection, the babe was found
to have a blue mark, apparently tattooed, on
his left temple, resembling a flash of lightning,
if it resembled anything. The mayor
added to the register a note, "Private mark: a
little blue thunderbolt on the left temple"—
which he might as well have let alone. The
infant never discovered his parents, nor his parents
him. But French law was satisfied. Two years
afterwards, Gendarme Gigon retired on a
pension; and his wife came into the unexpected
inheritance of a farm, called Les Vieux Chênes,
or The Old Oaks, and of vineyards, which placed
them quite in easy circumstances. The foundling's
education received all the benefit of the
change.

And now comes the ill-mended flaw in the
story, which puts the candid reader in search
of truth completely at fault, just as an
earthquake would throw out the miner who was
tracing through the rock a rich vein of precious
metal. The biographer's materials were supplied
by Jean Gigon, the foundling, himself; he could,
therefore, only know what Jean Gigon chose
to tell of this part of his history. The real facts
appear to be, that Jean, a spoiled child, had been
presented with a gun (in reward for good
conduct and advancement in his studies), and was
very fond of rabbit-shooting, in which he was
habitually accompanied by his foster-sister, little
Marie, otherwise called Gigonnette, who acted
the part of both beater and retriever; that on
one of these expeditious Marie disappeared
(Jean says she was suddenly kidnapped by a man
on horseback); that Marie's mother accused
him, the foundling, of having killed her child,
intentionally or accidentally; that she lost her
reason in consequence, and never recovered it,
but died insane; and that Jean naturally took
his departure from his foster-parents' house the
very evening of the catastrophe, and engaged
himself as shepherd's boy in the adjacent
Pyrenees. We meet with a phantom of Marie