llages, and
chateaux, over which you gaze from the terrace in front of this unique
establishment. It has its pleasure-grounds and its park. Within the main
building, besides the extensive suite of apartments assigned to the
director, who resides there with his family, is another handsome suite
of apartments, reserved for the administrators, six in number, whenever
they may choose, collectively or severally, to visit St.-Gobain. These
apartments are furnished with stately simplicity, and the whole interior
preserves the grand air of the eighteenth century. The _fleurs de lis_
still adorn the lofty chimney-pieces, the waxed floors are sedulously
polished, and, as M. Henrivaux says, could the ghost of Lucas de Nehou
have returned to St.-Gohain only a year or two ago, he would have been
welcomed at the entrance gate by a Swiss wearing the royal liveries of
the House of Bourbon, and resting majestically on his halberd, like the
guards of the Scala Regia in the Vatican. This imposing warden has now
passed away, at the ripe age of a hundred and two, and M. Henrivaux
tells me that he was more alert and active to the last than his more
celebrated contemporary at Paris, the venerable Chevreuil.

When a new administrator first makes his appearance at St.-Gobain, I am
told, he is received with music by day and an illumination at night, a
grand mass is celebrated in the chapel dedicated to the royal Irish
martyr, and the whole place assumes for a moment the aspect of another
age.

In one of the _salons_ of the administration, two pictures commemorate
visits paid to the manufactory: one, under the Restoration, by the
Duchesse de Berri, the mother of the Count de Chambord; the other, under
the Second Empire, by the Empress Eugenie--pathetic pictures both,
making the room a place wherein to 'sit upon the floor and tell strange
stories of the deaths of kings.'

Beside the canvas in which the Empress appears--a graceful, gracious
woman in the prime of her life and her beauty--hangs a small mirror in a
gilded frame, silvered by her own imperial hand in the great workroom
of the manufactory. The work was well and deftly done, but so delicate
is the process that when the light strikes athwart this mirror at a
particular angle, you can clearly trace a faint hair line of shadow
traversing it, the ineffaceable record of a ripple of laughter which
broke from the Empress's lips at some gay remark made by one of the
personages grouped about he