above,
crowded with paintings. To live for a time among them would be a
delight; to glance at them for a moment was tantalization. All around
were the easels of the artists who come here to sketch--sharp-featured,
heavy-browed men, with unkempt hair and flowing beards, and in shabby
coats, stood before them, pallet and brushes in hand; and women by the
score,--some of them young and pleasing, with duennas patiently waiting
near by; but more often they were neither young nor beautiful, and with
an evident renunciation of pomps and vanities. We glanced at their
copies curiously. Sometimes they seemed the original in miniature, and
sometimes,--ah well, we all fail.

We looked in upon the annual exhibition of pictures at the Palais de
l'Industrie one day, and were particularly impressed with the _nudite_
of the modern school of French art. Pink-tinted flesh may be very
beautiful, but there must be something higher! We saw there, too,
another day, the clock on exhibition for a time before being consigned
to its destined place at Beauvais. It was even more wonderful than the
one so famous at Strasbourg. This was of the size of an ordinary church
organ, and of similar shape; a mass of gilt and chocolate-colored wood;
a mass of dials, great and small--of time tables, and, indeed, of tables
for computing everything earthly and heavenly, with dials to show the
time in fifty different places, and everything else that could, by any
possible connection with time, be supposed to belong to a clock. Upon
the top, Christ, seated in an arm-chair, was represented as judging the
world, his feet upon the clouds; on either side kneeling female figures
adored him. Just below, a pair of scales bided their time. On every peak
stood little images, while fifty puppets peeped out of fifty windows.
Just below the image of the Saviour, a figure emerged through an open
door at the striking of every quarter of an hour,--coming out with a
slide and occasional jerk by no means graceful. We had an opportunity of
observing all this in the three quarters of an hour of waiting. We
viewed the clock upon every side, being especially interested in a
picture at one point representing a rocky coast, a light-house, and a
long stretch of waves upon which labored two ships attached in some way
to the works within. They pitched back and forth without making any
progress whatever, in a way very suggestive to us, who had lately
suffered from a similar motion. A dozen