market people who fill the Halles, and whose
houses of refreshment were known by the names
of Paul Niquet, Bordier, Baratte, and half a
dozen other less famous cabaretiers. Unlike
those night houses in London, which M. Delvau
calls "des gin-palace, des tap-rooms, des beef-
houses, des beer-shops, des oyster-houses," the
Cabarets des Halles are now always closed at
midnight, though, until recently, this was not the
case. But Niquet's establishment has ceased to
exist for several years, and Niquet himself is
dead. It was a place in which, perhaps, more
spirituous liquors were consumed than in any
other cabaret of Paris—absinthe, cassis, and
brandy, the cheapest and the worst. The
consumers sat on benches ranged round a large
room, the floor of which, though paved, was
always damp and sloppy. As a natural
consequence, where so much fiery poison was
swallowed, quarrels were of frequent occurrence;
but, as it was not desirable to call in the guard
to quiet the refractory, Paul Niquet adopted
another course. He had arranged a series of
water-pipes, so placed as to enable him, when a
quarrel began, to souse the combatants well.
When it happened that they resisted this
application, he raised an apparatus which completely
blocked up the only issue from the room, and
the water rose and rose, from the ankle to the
knee, from the knee to the body, till the
disturbers of society begged for mercy. At the
cabarets of Bordier and Baratte, which remain
undemolished—the first at the corner of Rue
aux Ours, and the second in the Rue aux Fers
—you can both eat and drink, but, like Falstaff's
supper, the eating is only accidental.

We have mentioned the word absinthe,
familiarly called abs, in speaking of the Cabaret
Niquet. Widely as the custom has prevailed
latterly of drinking the pernicious spirit, its
consumption is nowhere so steadily
persevered in as at a certain dram-shop in the
Quartier Saint-Jacques, where, from four to
six o'clock every afternoon, no matter
whether it be wet or fine, twenty young men,
the members of a society called Le Club
des Absintheurs, assemble to drink as much
absinthe as their heads will carry. On entering
the club, which is restricted to twenty, who
cause vacancies only by death—a condition,
probably, of frequent occurrence—each new
member swears, as his co-mates have done, never
to drink or get drunk on anything but absinthe,
and this oath they strictly keep. We have heard
much of this fatal liqueur. M. Delvau describes
its effects in these words: "The drunkenness
caused by absinthe, resembles no other drunkenness
known. It is not the heavy intoxication of
beer, the fierce madness caused by brandy, or
the jovial humour produced by wine. No! It
takes you off your legs at the first glass, it
fastens on your shoulders wings of the widest
sweep, and you sail off into a country without
limit or horizon, but, at the same time, without
light or poetry. You think, like all great
dreamers, that you are stretching away towards
the infinite, and like all great ruminants you are
only tending to the incoherent. Great dreamers
are great explorers, and bring back some
treasures from these excursions into the land of the
ideal, but the absinthe-drinker returns from his
journey into the Sahara laden only with
imbecility, if not with madness."

There are five hundred of those gulfs of perdition
in Paris, and M. Delvau specifies several;
but, upon this revelation, we turn the page.

THE SUSSEX DOWNS.

WHATEVER Shakespeare may say to the
contrary, there is sometimes a good deal in a name.
The wanderer over the famous Downs of Sussex
must be aware of this fact when he recollects
the particular reputation which those undulating
billows of green sward have acquired, to the
exclusion of all other. The word "Downs" is a
mean word, exclusive of all ideas of sublimity and
grandeur; and, accordingly, we simply associate
the district with graziers, shepherds, and the best
of mutton, in the same way that we only think of
the Berkshire Downs as a training-ground for
race-horses. We never reflect that, at a distance
of fifty miles from London, within a two hours'
journey by rail, a range of green mountains
stretches from the old woodland tracts of Sussex
and Surrey to the brink of the sea. Yet
Gilbert White, the author of the Natural History
of Selborne—no mean authority in such matters
—speaks of them by that name, and says that
thirty years' acquaintance with their features
had only left him with an ever-increasing
admiration. Ray, the great naturalist, who frequently
viewed them from the house of a friend near
Lewes, alludes to them, in his Wisdom of God
in the Works of the Creation, as being, in
his opinion, equal to anything in the finest
parts of Europe. According to good
etymological authorities, "Downs " is a Saxon word
for "hills;" but the ordinary Briton does
not know this, or will not recognise it. He
thinks of his quarters of lamb, and his haunches
of mutton; admires the shortness of the turf,
in which he sees nothing but the first principle
of prospective dinners; and reserves his
enthusiasm for Wales and the Highlands, the
lakes of Cumberland, and the waters of
Killarney.

These comfortable, but not very exalted,
associations would probably not exercise such
despotic power over our minds if the region in
question were known by a more dignified title.
Strike up northward from the sea into this green
wilderness of hill and dale, of dyke and foss, of
precipitous slopes and unexpected hollows; and,
if you have an eye for natural beauties, you will
be forced to confess that there is something
besides sheep to be noted on the Sussex Downs.
Look at the rounded outlines of those hills, steep
and abrupt to the feet that would climb or
descend them, but softened to the eye with such
graduated harmonies of transition, as the heights