nd hope begins to shine through the cloud of our distress,
like a passing gleam of the sun. From my very tail, sir, in my own name
and in that of this excellent and most prudent matron, and in those of
these two noble and youthful lovers, I thank you. Yes! honorable and
humane being of the genus homo, species Anglicus, we all return our most
tail-felt acknowledgments of your goodness!"

Here the whole party gracefully bent the ornaments in question over
their heads, touching their receding foreheads with the several tips,
and bowed. I would have given ten thousand pounds at that moment to
have had a good investment in tails, in order to emulate their form of
courtesy; but naked, shorn, and destitute as I was, with a feeling of
humility I was obliged to put my head a little on one shoulder and give
the ordinary English bob, in return for their more elaborate politeness.

"If I were merely to say, sir," I continued, when the opening
salutations were thus properly exchanged, "that I am charmed at this
accidental interview, the word would prove very insufficient to express
my delight. Consider this hotel as your own; its domestics as your
domestics; its stores of condiments as your stores of condiments, and
its nominal tenant as your most humble servant and friend. I have been
greatly shocked at the indignities to which you have hitherto been
exposed, and now promise you liberty, kindness, and all those attentions
to which it is very apparent you are fully entitled by your birth,
breeding, and the delicacy of your sentiments. I congratulate myself
a thousand times for having been so fortunate as to make your
acquaintance. My greatest desire has always been to stimulate the
sympathies; but until to-day various accidents have confined the
cultivation of this heaven-born property in a great measure to my own
species; I now look forward, however, to a delicious career of new-born
interests in the whole of the animal creation, I need scarcely say in
that of quadrupeds of your family in particular."

"Whether we belong to the class of quadrupeds or not, is a question
that has a good deal embarrassed our own savans" returned the stranger.
"There is an ambiguity in our physical action that renders the point a
little questionable; and therefore, I think, the higher castes of our
natural philosophers rather prefer classing the entire monikin species,
with all its varieties, as caudae-jactans, or tail-wavers; adopting
the term from