f
the basket it was in, and the blood rushed out of the great arteries in
torrents.

The windows of the _Place de Greve_ were, as usual on such occasions,
filled with ladies.[11] Many persons were performing on violins, and
trumpets, in order to pass the time away, and to relieve the tediousness
of expectation.

[Note 11: Mrs. Robinson tells me, that when she was at Paris, a few
years ago, her _valet de place_, came early one morning, informing her
there would be a _grand spectacle_, and wanted to know if he should hire
a place for her. This superb spectacle was no other than the execution
of two murderers, who were to be broken alive on the wheel, in the Place
de Greve, on that day. She however says, that she declined going.]

I have on several other days seen felons sitting on stools on this
scaffold, with their hands tied, and their arms and bodies fastened to a
stake by a girth, bareheaded, with an inscription over their heads,
specifying their crimes and punishment; they are generally thus exposed
during five or fix hours, and then sent to prison, or to the gallies
according to the sentence.

VERSAILLES. BOTANY. SOUNDING MERIDIANS.

I went once to Versailles; there is hardly any thing in the palace but
the bare walls, a very few of the looking-glasses, tapestry, and large
pictures remaining, as it has now been near two years uninhabited. I
crossed the great canal on foot; there was not a drop of water in it.

In the _Menagerie_ I saw the Rhinoceros, which has been 23 years there;
there is likewise a lion, with a little dog in the same den, as his
companion, and a zebra.

The collection of orange trees cannot be matched in any country where
these trees do not grow naturally; the number is about six hundred, the
largest trunk is about fifteen inches in diameter, and the age of the
most ancient of these trees exceeds three centuries.

The _Jardin Potager_, or kitchen garden, is of fifty acres, divided into
about five or six and twenty small gardens, of one, two, or three acres,
walled round, both for shelter to the plants, and for training fruit
trees against. One of these gardens, of two acres, was entirely allotted
to the culture of melons, and these were all of the warty _rock
cantalupe_ kind, and were growing under hand-glasses, in the manner of
our late cucumbers for pickling.

The season had been so unfavourable for wall-fruit, that (as the
gardener told me) all these gardens had yielded less