base of a square tower and the foot of a corkscrew staircase. We mount it, spirally and slowly. The well-worn stone steps are narrow, and the turn of the spiral is sharp, for this tower was built when homes were fortresses, when space was precious, and when hundreds huddled within walls that will hardly hold one thriving establishment of our day. In this steep ascent, we get scant assistance from our hold on the rude hand-rail, roughly grooved in the great central column—one solid tree-trunk, embedded in the ground, stretching to the top of the stairs. Experts assure us that this tree was fully five hundred years old, when it was cut down to be made the shaft of this stairway, nearly five hundred years ago. For this stone tower is evidently of late fifteenth-century construction. The mediæval towers were round, whether built upon their own foundations or rebuilt from Roman towers; and they gave way to square towers when battering-rams gave way to guns, in the fifteenth century. Yet this pile of masonry is known as "la tour de Dagobert," and with no wish to discredit this legend, cherished by the dwellers in this quarter, we may quote Brantôme concerning certain local traditions of the Tour de Nesle: "Je ne puis dire si çela soit vrai, mais le vulgaire de Paris l'affirme."

We can say, with certainty, that this tower was never seen by Dagobert, for, long before this tree had sprouted from the ground, he lived in the old Palace, the home of the early kings, at the other end of the island. There he flourished, for the ten years between 628 and 638, in coarse splendor and coarser conviviality, his palace packed with barbaric gold and silver, with crude wall paintings and curious hangings. For this monarch made much of the arts of his day, whenever he found leisure from his fighting and his drinking. Because of his love of luxury, a century of cyclopædias has "curved a contumelious lip" at his "corrupt court." On the other hand, he has been styled "Saint Dagobert" by writers unduly moved to emotion by his gifts to the churches at Saint-Denis, Rheims, Tours; and by his friendship for certain bishops. But Rome, mindful of sundry other churches plundered and destroyed by him, has not assented to this saintship. We may accept his apt popular epithet, "le bon," which meant, in those bellicose days, only merry or jovial; an easy virtue not to be denied by priggish biographers to this genial ruffian. By turns, he devoted himself to the flowing bowl in his palace there, and to building religious edifices all over the face of France. And he has accentuated the supremacy of the Church over all the warriors and the rulers of his day, in the soaring majesty of the two towers that dominate the buried outlines of his favorite church of Saint-Martin at Tours, solid and lasting in their isolation. There the man is brought almost into touch with us, while here only his name is recalled by this tower, which he never saw.

The shadow-land of ancient French history, into which we have made this little journey, is not darker than this narrow staircase, as we creep dizzily upward, losing count of steps, stopping to take breath at the infrequent windows, round-topped at first, then square and small. It is with surprise that we realize, stepping out on the tower-roof, that our standing-place is only five floors from the ground; and yet from this modest height, overtopped by the ordinary apartment house of Paris, we find an outlook that is unequalled even by that from Notre-Dame's towers. For, as we come out from the sheltering hood of our stair-way top, the great cathedral itself lies before us, like some beautiful living creature outstretched at rest. Words are impertinent in face of the tranquil strength of its bulk and the exquisite delicacy of its lines, and we find refuge in the affectionate phrase of Mr. Henry James, "The dear old thing!"

Beyond the cathedral square, over the bronze Charlemagne on his bronze horse, glints the untravelled narrower arm of the Seine; we turn our heads and look at its broader surface, all astir with little fidgetty bateaux-mouches and big, sedate barges. At both banks are anchored huge wash-houses and bathing establishments. From this island-centre all Paris spreads away to its low encircling slopes, to the brim of the shallow bowl in which it lies. In sharp contrast with all that newness, our old tower stands hemmed about by a medley of roofs of all shapes and all ages; their red tiles of past style, here and there, agreeably mellowing the dull dominant blue of the Paris slate. On these roofs below jut out dormers, armed with odd wheels and chains for lifting odd burdens; here on one side is an outer staircase that starts in vague shadow, and ends nowhere, it would seem; far down glimmers the opaque gray of the glass-covered courts at our feet. A little toward the north—where was an entrance to this court, in old days, from a gateway on the river-bank—is the roof that sheltered Racine, along with the legal gentry of the Hôtel des Ursins. And all about us, below, lies the little that is left of la Cité, the swept and set-in-order leavings of that ancient network of narrow streets, winding passages, blind alleys, all walled about by tall, scowling houses, leaning unwillingly against one another to save themselves from falling. This was the whole of Gallic Lutetia, the centre of Roman Lutetia, the heart of mediæval Paris, the "Alsatia" of modern Paris; surviving almost to our time, when the Second Empire let light and air into its pestilent corners. Every foot of this ground has its history. Down there, Villon, sneaking from the University precincts, stole and starved and sang; there Quasimodo, climbing down from his tower, foraged for his scant supplies; there Sue's impossibly dark villany and equally impossible virtue found fitting stage-setting; there, François, honest and engaging thief, slipped narrowly through the snares that encompassed even vagabonds, in the suspicious days and nights of the Terror.

The nineteenth century, cutting its clean way through this sinister quarter, cutting away with impartial spade the round dozen churches and the hundreds of houses that made their parishes, all clustered close about the cathedral and the palace, has happily left untouched this gray tower, built when or for what no one knows. It is a part of all that it has seen, in its sightless way, through the changing centuries of steady growth and of transient mutilation of its town. It has seen its own island and the lesser islands up-stream gradually alter their shapes; this island of the city lengthening itself, by reaching out for the two low-shored grassy eyots down-stream, where now is Place Dauphine and where sits Henri IV. on his horse. The narrow channel between, that gave access to the water-gate of the old Palace, has been filled in, so making one island of the three, and Rue de Harlay-au-Palais covers the joining line. So the two islands on the east—Île Notre-Dame and Île aux Vaches—have united their shores to make Île Saint-Louis. The third island, most easterly of all—Île des Javiaux of earliest times, known later as Île Louvier—has been glued to the northern bank of the mainland, by the earthing-in of the thin arm of the river, along the line of present Boulevard Morland, and Quai Henri IV. And the two great islands as we know them—the permanent outcome of all these topographical transformations—have been chained to each other and to both banks, by numerous beautiful bridges.

Our tower raised its head in time to see the gradual wearing away of the mighty Roman aqueduct, that brought water to the Palais des Thermes of the Roman rulers—whose immense frigidarium is safe and sound within the enclosure of the Cluny Museum—from the Bièvre, away