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144 he deemed his best, because his last, probably. The real thing, that would please you better than all the reliques in Belgium, is the establishment of Eau de Cologne, of the actual Jean Maria Farina, whose name and fame have penetrated as far as Napoleon's. No wonder that this dirtiest of all towns should have elicited the perfumer's faculties. When some one said, "The Rhine washes Cologne," it was pithily asked, "What washes the Rhine?"

Another sight here, my dear C., would in earnest have pleased you; the only one of the kind I have seen on the Continent: troops of little boys and girls with their books and slates. A woman of distinction, who was born here, tells us that the feudal feeling of clanship is in high preservation. "I never come here," she says, "without being assailed by some one of the basse classelow class [sic], who obliges me to listen to all the details of a family grievance as if it were the affair of my own household." This sentiment of feudal dependance will probably melt away before the aforesaid books and slates. So the good goes with the bad. It is a pity we have not a moral flail; but, as of old, the tares and the wheat are too intricately intermingled for human art to separate them. I promised to spare you the churches of Cologne, but I cannot pass by the Cathedral. It would be as bad as the proverbial leaving out Hamlet from the enacting of his own tragedy. The Cologne Cathedral is not, and probably never will be, finished. It impressed me anew with a conviction of the immortality of the human mind. What an infinite distance between its