a voluble guide. Royal fingers may have touched the pretty
trinkets lying about; royal forms reclined upon the soft couches; royal
aching hearts beat to the tick of the curious gilt clock, that bore as
many faces as a woman, some one wickedly said; but it was impossible to
realize it, or to believe that high heels, and panniers, and jaunty hats
upon sweet-faced, shrill-voiced American girls had not ruled and reigned
here always, as they did this day.

Versailles lies out beyond St. Cloud, but we gave to it another day. We
were a merry party, led by Dr. R., who left the train at the station,
and filled the omnibus for the palace. There was an air of having seen
better days about the city, which was at one time the second of
importance in France; it fed and fattened upon the court, and when at
last the court went away not to return, it came to grief. The most vivid
recollection I have of the great court-yard, around which extend three
sides of the palace, is of its round paving-stones--that seemed to have
risen up preparatory to crying out--and the grove of weather-stained
statues upon high pedestals,--generals, cardinals, and statesmen who
hated and connived against each other in life, doomed now in stone to
stare each other out of countenance. I am sure we detected a wry face
here and there, to say nothing of clinched fists. It is a gloomy old
court-yard at best. The front of the main building is all that remains
of the old hunting-seat of Louis XIII., which his son would not suffer
to be destroyed. It is of dingy, mildewed brick, that can never in any
possible light appear palatial; and so blackened and purple-stained are
the statues before it that they might have been just brought from the
Morgue. The whole palace is only a show place now--a museum of painting
and statuary. As for the celebrated gardens, we walked for hours, and
still they stretched away on every side. We explored paths wide and
narrow, crooked and straight, and saw clipped trees by the mile, with
grottoes and the skeletons of the fountains that, like naughty children,
play o' Sundays, and all the wonderful trees, shrubs, and flowers
brought from the ends of the earth, and ate honey gingerbread (flavored
with extract of turpentine) before an open booth, and were ready to
faint with weariness; and when at last a broad avenue opened before us
with the Trianons, which must be seen, at the farther end, we would not
have taken the whole place as a gift. It