what some think curiosities, and others
rubbish, was arranged along one side of the
room. Amid the medley of carved ivory
boxes, Chinese mandarins, and black-letter
books, one pair of curiosities elaborately
labelled attracted me; the shoe and patten
of a certain Mrs. Susannah Dobson, or
some such name, the daughter of her father
and mother, whose names were inscribed.
She died — the label told us how many years
ago, and also that a monument to her memory
had been erected in her parish church!
the old lady was doubtless a notability in
her day, and we saw how people walked
in pattens when they were ingenious inventions.

By this time we had gone pretty well
through the Exhibition, and prepared to
retrace our steps over the rocky moor. That
strange wild district seems to lie apart from
all the world, but in some of the scattered
cottages, there are histories going on, beside
which the incidents in a French novel are
tame. There are men and women, too, who
go about looking quite rough and natural, who
have had incidents in their past lives that
one would have thought must inevitably have
wrecked any existence for ever— but it seems
that fancy goes for a great deal in these
matters. The matter-of-fact prosaic manner
in which I was told some of the most startling
incidents one could well listen to, astonished
me even more than the things themselves.
When we once more reached Bills o' Jacks, we
had only time to have tea; for the evenings
soon begin to close in, and our road home
was not made for travelling in darkness.
Our return home did not seem likely to be as
successful as our coming out; for the little
jade of a mare— who had had nothing to do
but eat corn and enjoy herself— chose to be
excited at finding herself in a strange place,
and to be startled by the sound of the falling
water, and began to plunge and dance in a
way that Clytemnestra called playful. She
made as many excuses for her as a mother
might for a spoiled child; but the two facts
remained— that I was a rank coward and that
the road for the first two miles was down a
hill that was awkward enough when we came
up it in the morning. So Cordelia good-naturedly
walked with me to the bottom;
although I am sure it must have tried the patience
of both sisters to see me frightened at
what they did every day. When we were
once more fairly seated in the cart, I was
told that the mare had been kept without
work and on an extra allowance of corn for
three or four days, "in order that she
might be quite fresh for us." It was ungrateful
of me, but how thankfully would
I have changed her for a sedate cart-horse
without any imagination, and with much
less corn! The lights were gleaming on the
hill sides as we passed along, and the dusk
had long set in before we arrived home, and
found Adeliza looking anxiously up the street
for us, for she had begun to feel some misgivings
about our capabilities of taking care
of ourselves. She had a comfortable supper
ready for us, and when she had heard our adventures,
she declared, with an emphatic
shake of her head, that the little Jezebel of a
mare should go through a course of hard
work before she trusted her to go anywhere
without her again.

Thus we accomplished one object of our
expedition. We had seen the Great Saddleworth
Exhibition; but the pranks of the
mare had prevented us from bringing home
a single bilberry.

DEAD RECKONING AT THE
MORGUE.

ON the island of the city of Paris, stands
the Palace of Justice, with its numerous
courts of law and echoing Hall of the Lost
Footsteps (Salle des Pas perdus); its near
and necessary neighbour, the Prison of the
Concièrgerie, once vomiting indiscriminately
into the guillotine-cart crime and innocence;
the Holy Chapel, that marvel of Gothic
architecture; the great flower market, which,
with its rival on the Place de la Madeleine,
supplies all Paris with bouquets; the
Prefecture of Police, where strangers must go
or send, if for no other purpose than to have
their passports indorsed; the great cathedral
of Nôtre Dame, alone worthy of a pilgrimage;
the hospital of the Hôtel Dieu, always
dedicated to humanity, and once called by
that name, when the virtue was scarce in
Paris; and, not the least curious, though, to
the majority of sight-seers, perhaps the least
agreeable, the Morgue or "dead-house."

Why the Morgue is so designated, few
except philologists can tell. According to
Vaugelas, morgue is an old French word signifying
face; and it is still used to express a
consequential look or haughty manner reflected
from the countenance. In former times there
used to be a small lobby just within the entrance
to all the prisons, which, in France, was
called the morgue; because it was there that
the gaolers examined the morgue or face of
each prisoner before he was taken to his cell,
that he might be recognised in case of attempted
evasion. At a later period, it was in
these ante-chambers that the bodies of such
as were found dead in the streets or elsewhere,
were exposed, for recognition, to the gaze of
the public, who peeped at them through a
wicket in the prison door. In Paris, the
general place of exposure was in the lower
gaol or morgue of the prison of the great
Châtelet, and the principal regulations to be
observed in giving effect to the measure were
set forth in a police ordinance of the ninth
of the month Floréal, in the year eight, which
means the twenty-eighth of April, eighteen
hundred, as follows:—

As soon as a corpse was brought to the
lower gaol, it was to be exposed to public