THE CATHEDRAL OF SAINTE CROIX.

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foreign language in our ear, a new costume before our eye, new manners, new features, new character, in men, their business, pleasures, customs, habitations.

On entering the town, we found, instead of a plain of houses, as it had appeared, a series of streets rising on gentle eminences. In one place, indeed, the inequality of the ground is so great, that a street is thrown like a bridge over the valley, in which other streets run below. The effect here, however, is not so great as the same circumstance produces on the more gigantic proportions of Edinburgh. Many of the streets are narrow, winding, irregular, and picturesque; but, in general, they are well built, and apparently intended for the accommodation of the better middle orders of society. The doors and windows, as we passed, were all open, gasping for air, and the interior of the houses distinctly visible. On the shady side of the street the inhabitants sat, working languidly on the comparatively cool stones of the pavement.

We at length arrived at the cathedral, and were thankful that we had done so; for there is not a more delightful refuge from the glare of the sun than a cathedral aisle. In the distance, a priest was standing at the high altar, with four boys, dressed in white, kneeling on the steps behind him. The enclosed area was lined on either side with a rank of kneeling priests, in highly picturesque costume; and the whole of these figures were so absolutely motionless, as to resemble statues more than living men. Before the rails there was a coffin, with a plain black pall, and near it a few mourners on their knees, the men at one side, and the women at the other. The rite, therefore, in which they were engaged, was the service for the dead. The profound silence of all, both priests and laymen, the clasped hands, the eyes fixed on the ground, the utter

lifelessness of the figures, together with the gorgeous dresses of the ecclesiastics, the black weeds of the mourners, and the solemn and antique grandeur of the temple above and around them, formed in their union one of the most remarkable pictures we had ever beheld.

Suddenly a low, mournful chant, deepened and mellowed by wind instruments, broke from the lips of the priests, and, resounding for a few moments through the temple, died slowly away. It was answered by a shrill but sweet strain, in the voices either of women or boys; and as the singers were invisible-concealed, probably, by an immense black drapery which overhung the space behind the altar, it seemed like a reply from heaven. The whole ceremony was inexpressibly touching, from its solemnity, and the contrast afforded by its earnestness to the busy scene without.

The cathedral, called the church of Sainte Croix, was founded in the thirteenth century, ruined by the Calvinists in the sixteenth, and rebuilt by Henri Quatre, who laid the corner-stone in person, in 1601. The ancient towers remained till about a century ago, when they were demolished to make room for their successors, which, with the portico, also a modern erection, are the finest parts of an edifice supposed to be one of the most beautiful specimens of ecclesiastical architecture in France.

A short distance from the Sainte Croix is the Mairie-a jumble of old houses, surrounding a court not vastly unlike an English farm-yard. If the reader imagines himself standing with his back to the gate, he will comprehend the position of the artist while sketching the annexed view. On the left is the theatre, with two lower buildings, appearing as wings, one of which is the Café de Loiret, and the other the Café de la Comédie. The cathedral then appears, with its fine Gothic towers overtopping the