dens, or cages, and how often do they
feed?

Cousin Dempster set down his pewter mug, and just stared at me with all
his eyes.

"What is it? What do you mean?" says he.

"What! the lion, to be sure! Didn't you say that I would see one of the
city lions when I came to Fulton Market?"

That man must have been possessed. He leaned back in his chair, he
stooped forward, his face turned red, and, oh! my how he did laugh!

"What possesses you, Cousin D.," says I, riling up.

"Oh, nothing," says he, wiping the tears from his eyes, and trying to
stop laughing, though he couldn't; "only--only this isn't a menagerie,
but a market. Did you really think there were wild beasts on exhibition?
It was the market we meant."

Then I remembered that E. E. had called me a lion once. Now it was the
market, and there wasn't a sign of the wild beast in either case. There
_he_ sat laughing till he cried, because I couldn't understand that
ladies and markets were not wild animals. Says I to myself, "I'll make
you laugh out of the other side of your mouth,"--so I turned to him as
cool as a cucumber:

"What on earth are you te-he-ing about? I only want to walk around the
market and see what's going on. Isn't that what we came for?"

Cousin D. stopped laughing, and began to look sheepish enough.

"Is that it?" says he.

"What else?" says I. "You didn't think I expected this great, big,
low-roofed market to have paws and growl, did you," says I. "I would
growl if the city were to set me down in the mud of this pestiferous
place. So you thought I really meant it. Well, the easy way in which
some men are taken in is astonishing. They never can understand
metaphor," says I. "But the bivalves and Rockaways. What of them?" says
I.

"Swallowed them," says he. Sisters, the dizziness in my stomach was
awful.

XXXIII.

DEMPSTER PROPOSES A TRIP.

Dear sisters:--I have been in Washington. The great city of a great
nation. I have seen the Capitol in all its splendid magnificence, its
pictures, its marbled floor, its fruit tables, and its underground
eating-rooms. I have seen the White House, and have had a bird's-eye
view of the President of these United States.

I will tell you how it happened. I was getting anxious and down in the
mouth; my valentine had been given to the winds of heaven--no, _they_
would have carried it safely through ten thousand herds of buffalo
cattle--but it had been given to the mails, and they are _so_ un