Page:Pleasant Memories of Pleasant Lands.djvu/269

 OBELISK OF LUXOR.

��AMONG the conspicuous objects that in Paris, by their number and beauty, astonish the stranger, he will find himself early attracted to the ancient obelisk of Luxor. A single shaft of red sienite, it is covered with hieroglyphics, most of which refer to Sesostris, during whose reign it was originally erected.

It finds its new home in the Place la Concorde, known during the reign of the Bourbons, as the Place Louis Fifteenth, and christened in the time of terror the Place de la Revolution. Fearful baptisms of blood has that spot known, from the trampling down of thou sands, in the fatal rush at the marriage festival of Louis Sixteenth, to the sad spectacle of his own decapitation, and that of the throng who night and day fed the guil lotine. In the two years that succeeded his death, more than two thousand persons, of both sexes, were executed here, until it was said, that the soil, pampered with its terrible aliment, rose up, and burst open, and refused to be trodden down like other earth.

In such good preservation is this relic of antiquity and art, that the mind is slow in believing that nearly

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