e place, that I might, but for disinclination on my
part, pass half my time in visiting the spots where they were
perpetrated. It was but to-day I was requested to go and examine a kind
of sewer, lately described by Louvet, in the Convention, where the blood
of those who suffered at the Guillotine was daily carried in buckets, by
men employed for the purpose.*

* "At the gate of St. Antoine an immense aqueduct had been
constructed for the purpose of carrying off the blood that was shed
at the executions, and every day four men were employed in taking it
up in buckets, and conveying it to this horrid reservoir of
butchery."
Louvet's Report, 2d May.

--These barbarous propensities have long been the theme of French
satyrists; and though I do not pretend to infer that they are national,
yet certainly the revolution has produced instances of ferocity not to be
paralleled in any country that ever had been civilized, and still less in
one that had not.*

* It would be too shocking, both to decency and humanity, to recite
the more serious enormities alluded to; and I only add, to those I
have formerly mentioned, a few examples which particularly describe
the manners of the revolution.--

At Metz, the heads of the guillotined were placed on the tops of
their own houses. The Guillotine was stationary, fronting the
Town-house, for months; and whoever was observed to pass it with
looks of disapprobation, was marked as an object of suspicion. A
popular Commission, instituted for receiving the revolutionary tax
at this place, held their meetings in a room hung with stripes of
red and black, lighted only with sepulchral lamps; and on the desk
was placed a small Guillotine, surrounded by daggers and swords. In
this vault, and amidst this gloomy apparatus, the inhabitants of
Metz brought their patriotic gifts, (that is, the arbitrary and
exorbitant contributions to which they were condemned,) and laid
them on the altar of the Guillotine, like the sacrifice of fear to
the infernal deities; and, that the keeping of the whole business
might be preserved, the receipts were signed with red ink, avowedly
intended as expressive of the reigning system.

At Cahors, the deputy, Taillefer, after making a triumphal entry
with several waggons full of people whom he had arrested, ordered