How Kindly The Lady Who Keeps This Flower
Shop Shows Us All Her Flowers!
How she seems to love them, as if
they were her children!
We must get a bouquet to show our gratitude
for her kindness, though she would not demand it. At every street
corner is a woman with a basket of violets and evergreens. She
offers them in such a pretty way, taking care that you shall take
their perfume. You cannot resist them.
Now, suppose we were taking a walk, some other morning. Before us is
the "Place de la Concorde," all glistening in the spring sunlight.
See, there, in the centre, is the Obelisk - a monument of the time of
Sesostris, King of Egypt, erected by him before the great temple of
Thebes more than three thousand years ago, or fifteen hundred and
fifty years before Christ. This enormous stone, all of one piece,
seventy-two feet high, seven feet and a half square at the base, of
red granite, and covered with hieroglyphic inscriptions, was given
to the French government by the Viceroy of Egypt, in consideration
of an armed and naval establishment which that government had helped
him to form at Alexandria. Eight hundred men struggled for three
months in Egypt, in the midst of all manner of hardships, building a
road and constructing machinery to drag the obelisk, completely
cased in wood, down to the Nile. It cost two millions of francs to
place this monument where it now stands. This was done with great
pomp and ceremony in October, 1836, the royal family and about a
hundred and fifty thousand other people looking on.
Now try to place yourself in imagination at the foot of this great
Obelisk of Luxor, mounted up as it is upon a single block of gray
granite of France, covered all over with gilded engraving of the
machinery used in placing the great thing where it is. The Place de
la Concorde itself, which surrounds you, is eight sided; and if the
excavations around it were filled with water, it would be an island,
seven hundred feet or so across, and connected with the main land by
four elegant little bridges. But instead of water, these "diggings"
are beautifully filled with flower gardens. At the eight corners of
the island are eight pavilions, as they are called; or great watch
houses, of elegant architecture, occupied by the military or the
police, as occasion requires. Each of these forms the base of a
gigantic statue, representing one of the principal cities of France.
It is as if the whole eight were sitting in friendly council for the
good of Paris. How beautiful they are, with their grand
expressionless faces, and their graceful attitudes, and their simple
antique drapery. They are all sitting in their mural crowns, - the
fortified cities on cannons, the commercial ones on bales of goods.
Strasburg alone seems full of life. She has her arm akimbo, as if
braving Germany, to which she once belonged.
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