"These Creatures build themselves houses of wood clay, close by the Ponds sides, and knowing the Seasons, build them answerable houses, having them three stories high, so that as land-floods are raised by great Raines, as the waters arise they mount higher in their houses; as they assuage, they descend lower againe. These houses are so strong, that no creature saving an industrious man, with his penetrating tooles can prejudice them, their ingress and egress being under water. These make likewise very good Ponds, knowing whence a streame runnes from betweene two Hils, they will there pitch downe piles of Wood, placing sinailer rubbish before it with clay and sods, not leaving, till by their Art and Industry they have made a firme and cu rious damme-head, which may draw admiration from wise understanding men. These creatures kerpe themselves to their owne families, never parting so long as they are able to keepe house together; And it is commonly sayd, if any Beaver accidentally light into a strange place, he is made a drudge so long as he lives there, to carry at the greater end of the logge, unless he creepe away by stealth. Their wisdom secures them from the English, who seldome or never kills any of them, being not patient to lay a long siege, to be so often deceived by their cunuing evasions, so that all the Beaver which the English have, comes first from the Indians, whose time and experience fits them for that employment.",

mind to believe what authors have said about thein. The first time I saw them was on a canal, a few miles from Ningpo. I was then on my way to a celebrated temple in the quarter, where I intended to remain for some time, in order to make some collections of objects of ntural history in the neighborhood. When the birds came in sight, I immediately made my boatmen take in our sail, and we remained stationary for some time to observe their proceedings. There were two small boats, containing one man and about ten or twelve birds in each. The birds were standing perched on the sides of the little boat, and apparently had just arrived at the fishing ground, and were about to commence operations. They were now ordered out of the boat by their master; and so well trained were they that they went on the water immediately, seated themselves over the canal, and began to look for fish. They have a beautiful sea-green eye, and quick as lightning they see and dive upon the finny tribe, which once caught in the sharpnotched bill of the bird never by any possibility, can escape. The cormorant now rises to the surface with the fish in its bill, and the moment he is seen by the Chinaman, he is called back to the boat. As docile as a dog, he swims after his master, and allows himself to be pulled into the san-pan, where he disgorges his prey, and again resumes his labors. And what is more wonderful still, if one of the cormorants gets hold of a fish of large size, so large that he would have some difficulty in taking it to the boat, some of the others seeing his dilemma, hasten to his assistance, and with their efforts united capture the fish, and haul him off to the boat. Sometimes a bird seemed to get lazy or playful and swam about without attending to his business, and then the Chinaman with a long bamboo which he also used for propelling the boat, struck the water near where the bird was, without however hurting him, calling out to him, at the same time, in angry tones. Immediately, like the truant schoolboy who neglects his lessons, and is found out, the cormorant gives up his play and resumes his labors. small string is put round the neck of the bird, to prevent him from swallowing the fish which he catches; and great care is taken that this string is placed and fastened so that it will not choke him.-SEL.

A

Streets of Paris.

Though France be the native country of feudalism and chivalry, yet the Paris of the middle ages is not a very interesting city to the imagination. It wants a distinct historical character. It has no monuments of splendid civic aristocracies, like those of Italy; nor of the higher order of burgher-life and independence, like the cities of the Netherlands; no sacred corner, like Westminster, with its overpowering tide of national recollections. It scarcely showed any signs of the turbulent freedom of the old communes, except once, in the ferocious period of the Burgundian and Armagnac massacres-unless we are to add the time of the League, with its coarse and sanguinary fanaticism. For a city of such antiquity and importance, moreover, it is remarkable how little Paris has, or ever had, to show of the architectural splendor of the ages in question. Except the Sainte Chapelle, no first-rate specimen of ecclesiastical architecture, as far as we are aware, ever existed at Paris; none, at least, of Parisian origin and character. Notre-Dame is a poor specimen of the art of the fourteenth century. The absence of steeples and pinnacles in the distant view of Paris; the peculiar feature of most old northern cities; is very noticeable; nor were they ever much more numerous than at present. Nor are we believers in the tales which Parisian antiquaries very pardonably credit, of the ancient splendor and wealth of their capital. We have no faith in the 275,000 inhabitants whom Dureau de la Malle crowds within its narrow circuit in the reign of Philip le Bel; and scarcely believe in the 40,000 well-armed soldiers whom it turned out, if we may credit Monstrelet, in the middle of the famine and miseries of the fifteenth century. Compared with other famous towns of Europe, for the seven long centuries after Charlemagne, we believe it to have been a poor and gloomy city; not incorrectly represented, perhaps, by such wretched outskirts as the Faubourg Saint Marcel in later times, by which Candide entered Paris, and "thought himself in the most miserable village of Westphalia;" which banished all Alfieri's illusions, and seems to have left so indelible a first impression on the wayward Italian, that he could notice nothing in the French capital but the poverty of the pub

lie buildings, and the bruttissime facie del le donne.' Its slow and often-interrup ted improvements seem to have been ge nerally the results of royal command, ill obeyed-rately of civic or national spirit. There was no pavement until the royal stomach of Philip Augustus was turned, as he looked out of his window in the Cité, by the odors proceeding from a wagon ploughing up the mud of the streets; and the mandate which issued thereupon must have been slowly executed, for years elapsed before the perambulation of the streets by pigs was forbidden, when a son of Louis le Gros had been thrown from his horse by one of these untoward animals. Things, moreover, must soon have fallen back to their ancient condition; for the modern pavement of the Cité is said to be six feet above the level of that of Philip Augustus. From Philip le Bel, who built the first quay, down to Napoleon, who completed the double line within which the waters of the Seine are imprisoned, the chroniclers scarcely mention one popular name, among the long series of monarchs, to whom Paris owes these indispensable constructions.

The ancient university, the Sorbonne -nay, the Jesuit colleges, often remodelled and interfered with, never were the slaves of kings or popes, but sometimes their masters. And it so happens that the venerable quarter of the Pays Latin, still peopled by students, retains at the present day more of tradition, more perhaps of substantial antiquity, than all the rest put together. You may see at the College de Dainville, the very window, or that.which has passed for centuries as such, from which the body of Peter Ramus, murdered for denying the infallibility of the pope and Aristotle, was thrown on the pavement below. Hard by stands the old College des Cholets, where Buridan, that sage of equivocal reputation, rescued from his sack and the Seine, maintained for a whole day the thesis that it was lawful to slay a queen of France. The neighborhood of the Sorbonne contains the College or Hotel de Cluny; not historically celebrated, but the most beautiful specimen of Gothic art extant in Paris. It was utterly unknown and neglec. ted for ages.

But if the early history of Paris is thus comparatively scanty in topics of interest, the era which commences with the

revival of letters makes abundant compensation by the wealth of its recollections. The sixteenth century, of which we have scarcely any memorials left in London, is the date of many of the most remarkable buildings of Paris; the Tuileries, part of the Louvre, the Hotel de Ville, and many churches and still surviving hotels. Others, of greater magnificence, have passed away; such as the Hotel de la Reine, built by Catharine de Medicis, on the site of which the present Halle aux Blés stands, perhaps the finest private building of its age: its elegant tower alone remains. The sixteenth century began by emancipating kings and their dwellings from the constraint of feudalism and was, at least in Northern Europe, peculiarly the era of palaces and

courts.

If the reader would obtain a view of the spot which may almost be called the cradle of French social civilization-if he would at a single glance realize, to a certain extent, the external world of that era of chivalry and literature, wit, buffoonery, extravagance, and imagination, which is portrayed in the French Memoirs of the seventeenth century-he should travel in a direction in which, probably, not one in a thousand of our countrymen in Paris ever bends his steps, and, leaving the squalid bustle of the Rue Saint Antoine, turn by a narrow street into the Place Royale.

All the great hotels which we see here, of which the gates are closed and silent; and all these lofty windows, where no one shows himself except some servant-girl in rags; how were they called heretofore? These were the Hotel Sully, the Hotel Videix, the Hotel d'Aligre, the Hotel de Rohan, the Hotel Rotrou, the Hotel Guemenee; noble dwellings turned into ill-furnished lodgings, against which the cobbler of the corner, and the public scribe, have reared their squalid stalls! What may these aristocratic walls think of seeing themselves thus decayed, silent, disdained!

This famous Place Royale occupies the site of the ominous Hotel des Tournelles, built, or rebuilt, by an Englishman, the regent-duke of Bedford, when the English counted on the permanence of their dominion in France; the scene of the splendor and the crimes of the house of Valois; the site of the tournament where Henry Il. received his mor

tal wound; pulled down, in consequence it is said of superstitious terrors, by his son Charles IX. The Place Royale was built by Henry IV., and its style of architecture served as the model of Covent Garden, as well as many other civic constructions of the same age. Fashion soon selected its magnificent hotels for her residence; from which it has now departed for many generations.

Under the reign of Louis XIII., however, this silent square was the centre of society in Paris.

But while Richelieu broke down the feudal power of the nobles on the one hand, his jealous rule prevented the formation of any brilliant court on the other. Nor was the character of Louis XIII. suited to render him the centre of a sparkling circle, or the leader of the fashion of his kingdom.

The last epoch of the Hotel Rambouillet, as Sainte Neuve remarks, was from the death of Richelieu to the Fronde, (1642-1648.)

While the Spanish wat lasted, Paris, as we have seen, held continual festival. But after the peace of the Pyrenees, and the death of Mazarin, (1660), the king and court began to remove from Paris, first to Fontableau, afterwards to St. Germain, and ultimately settled down in the stateliness of Versailles.

The Marais, or neighborhood of the Place Royale, continued long to be the fashionable quarter. The quays of the left bank, whose architectural embellishment dates chiefly from this reign, became popular as promenades: the world of fushion, for a few years, used to parade up and down the broiling pavement of the Quais des Theatins and Malaquais. But the eastern end of the Faubourg Saint Germain was ultimately selected, in 1687, after many delays, as the head-quarters of Comedie Française.

It was not until the reign of Louis XV. that the Faubourg Saint Germain became the aristocratic quarter; a glory which may now be said to have nearly abandoned those monotonous walls, to irradiate, for the present, the gayer roofs of the Faubourg Saint Honoré.

The melancholy quarter of the Isle Saint Louis, which arose out of a building speculation of the seventeenth, was for a time a favorite resort of secondrate fashion, and legal fashion in particular.-Edinburgh Review.