I Am, However, Not In A Position To Answer For This Pedigree.

There is another point in the history of the fine old houses which command the Loire, of which, I

Sup- pose, one may be tolerably sure; that is, their having, placid as they stand there to-day, looked down on the horrors of the Terror of 1793, the bloody reign of the monster Carrier and his infamous _noyades_. The most hideous episode of the Revolution was enacted at Nantes, where hundreds of men and women, tied to- gether in couples, were set afloat upon rafts and sunk to the bottom of the Loire. The tall eighteenth-century house, full of the _air noble_, in France always reminds me of those dreadful years, - of the street-scenes of the Revolution. Superficially, the association is incongru- ous, for nothing could be more formal and decorous than the patent expression of these eligible residences. But whenever I have a vision of prisoners bound on tumbrels that jolt slowly to the scaffold, of heads car- ried on pikes, of groups of heated _citoyennes_ shaking their fists at closed coach-windows, I see in the back- ground the well-ordered features of the architecture of the period, - the clear gray stone, the high pilasters, the arching lines of the _entresol_, the classic pediment, the slate-covered attic. There is not much architecture at Nantes except the domestic. The cathedral, with a rough west front and stunted towers, makes no im- pression as you approach it.

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