ere green and slimy, the grottoes and shell-work crumbling
away, the fountains still, and the cascades dry. But the latter are
exhibited on certain days during the summer, when the gardens are
thronged with gay Parisians. The most interesting object however, is, the
orange-tree planted by Francis I. in 1421, which is in full health and
bearing: alas! we halted beside it, and thought of the wonderful
revolutions and uprootings that France had suffered since this tree was
planted.

In _Le Petit Trianon_ and its grounds the interesting Queen Marie
Antoinette passed many happy hours of seclusion; and would that her
retreat had been confined to the _maze_ of Nature, rather than she had
been engaged in the political intrigues which exposed her to the fury of
a revolutionary mob. In the palace we were shown the chamber of Marie
Antoinette, where the ruffians stabbed through the covering of the bed,
the queen having previously escaped from this room to the king's chamber;
and, as if to keep up the folly of the splendid ruin, a gilder was
renovating the room of the ill-starred queen.

* * * * *

RECENT BALLOON ASCENT.

(_To the Editor of the Mirror_.)

I trust you will pardon my feeble attempt last week, and I wish you had
been in the car with us, to have witnessed the magnificent scene, and the
difficulty of describing it. At our ascent we rose, in a few seconds, 600
feet; and instantly a flood of light and beautiful scenery burst forth.
Picture to yourself the Thames with its shipping; Greenwich with its
stately Hospital and Park; Blackwall, Blackheath, Peckham, Camberwell,
Dulwich, Norwood, St. Paul's, the Tower of London, &c. and the
surrounding country, all brought immediately into your view, all
apparently receding, and lit up into magnificence by the beams of a
brilliant evening sun, (twenty-seven minutes past seven,) and then say
who can portray or describe the scene, I say I cannot.

P.T.W.

* * * * *

THE NATURALIST.

* * * * *

BEES.

The faculty, or instinct of bees is sometimes at fault, for we often hear
of their adopting the strangest and most unsuitable tenements for the
construction of cells. A hussar's cap, so suspended from a moderate sized
branch of a tree, as to be agitated by slight winds, was found filled
with bees and comb. An old coat, that had been thrown over the decayed
trunk of a