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Our alpenstocks and muslin tails compelled attention, and as we moved through the village we gathered a considerable procession of little boys and girls, and so went in some state to the castle. It proved to be an extensive pile of crumbling walls, arches, and towers, massive, properly grouped for picturesque effect, weedy, grass-grown, and satisfactory.

No one state would ever be permitted by the rest to reach such an ascendency; and the next alternative of a division of the territory after the manner of Poland, was fraught with almost as much danger. The only hope for the peace of Europe was to keep in its integrity this crumbling wreck of a wicked, crime-stained old empire.

Fully five minutes passed before Ruth crossed the room to the honeysuckle-draped window, the roses pressed against her thumping heart. Outside, an ancient wooden bench that sagged dubiously in the middle stood against a crumbling stone wall.

But are there not some among her subjects who are deaf to the sounds of calm advice? some who are so blind as to love her faults and prop up her abuses? some who daub her walls with the untempered mortar of their blind prejudice, and treat every one as an enemy who would aid in removing here and there a bent pillar, and here and there a crumbling stone?

Crumbling silks and furs adorned the walls, with ancient weapons, and great paintings whose colors were toned by age to wondrous softness. "This be as good as any place," he said. "No one comes here. Never have I been here before, so I know no more of the other chambers than you; but this one, at least, I can find again when I bring you food and drink.

"Just one hundred and twenty years," repeated he, "since Titian was born. Venice was then in its glory, but now it is all falling; its churches and palaces are crumbling to dust, its commerce interrupted.

It was a very lively meal. The two actors ate voraciously, to the great delight of Delobelle, who talked over with them old memories of their days of strolling. Fancy a collection of odds and ends of scenery, extinct lanterns, and mouldy, crumbling stage properties.

All within is crumbling, mouldering, worn; the shrine has no image, only Shinto emblems, some poor paper lanterns whose once bright colours have vanished under a coating of dust, some vague inscriptions. I see the circular frame of a metal mirror; but the mirror itself is gone. Whither?

The economists and calculators might here interpose with a great deal of reason; for, indeed, there was no reason why a nation should impoverish itself to do honor to the memory of an individual for whom, after all, it can feel but a qualified enthusiasm: but it surely might have employed the large sum voted for the purpose more wisely and generously, and recorded its respect for Napoleon by some worthy and lasting memorial, rather than have erected yonder thousand vain heaps of tinsel, paint, and plaster, that are already cracking and crumbling in the frost, at three days old.

Behind them, Jean had been coming up swiftly, and now they heard him break for an instant into the chorus of one of the wild half-breed songs, and Philip listened to the words of the chant which is as old in the Northland as the ancient brass cannon and the crumbling fortress rocks at York Factory: "O, ze beeg black bear, he go to court, He go to court a mate; He court to ze Sout', He court to ze Nort', He court to ze shores of ze Indian Lake."