y.

"'Does it move you too,' said I? 'Are you discontented with your
lot.--Unhappy?'

"'Not exactly! But, Sir, formerly, you must know, the dresses, after
being six months exhibited, became a perquisite of ours; we sold them.
Now they talk of taking the dresses from us.'

"I reassured Francois as to the intention of government, and assured
him there was no talk of taking away the dresses.

"The second room, that which adjoins the public exhibition room, is
appropriated for the dissection of those, the mode of whose death
appears to the police to be suspicious. Its only furniture is a marble
table, on which the dissections take place, and a shelf on which are
placed several bottles of chlorate. This room is immediately above
the room of M. Perrin. The dissecting table above just answers to the
girls' piano below.

"In this room, which I crossed rapidly to avoid as much as possible
the sight of a body extended on the plank, I saw the little girl, who
had been stifled the night before in the diligence; she was a lovely
child. The other figure was frightfully disfigured; scarcely even
would his mother have recognised him.

"There remained only the public room; it is narrow, ill aired; ten or
twelve black and sloping stones receive the suicides, who are placed
on it almost in a state of nudity; the places are seldom all occupied,
except perhaps during a revolution. Then it is that the Morgue is
recruited; two more days of glory and immortality in July, and the
plague had been in Paris.

"'It is true,' said M. Perrin, 'we worked hard during the three days,
and we were allowed the use of two assistants. Corpses every where,
within, without, at the gate, on the bank.'--

"'And your girls?'

"'During these days they did not leave their apartment, nor looked
out to the street, nor to the river; besides, you are mistaken if you
think the spectacle would have terrified them. Brought up here,
they will walk at night without a light in front of the glass, which
divides the corpses from the public, without trembling; we become
accustomed to any thing.'

"Methought I heard the poor children, so familiar with the idea of
death, so accustomed to this domestic spectacle of their existence,
asking innocently of the strangers whom they visited,--as one would
ask where is your garden, your kitchen, or your cabinet,--'where do
_you_ keep your dead here?'

"These were all the facts I could gather with regard to the
establishmen