rely stipulating that the animal should be
muzzled, set to work and secured the coveted guerdon.

Something of a risk, perhaps. Still, it would have been a more serious
one if Lola had kept a rattlesnake.

Appearances are deceptive, and Bruin was less domesticated than Lola
imagined. One day, pining perhaps for fresh diet, he grappled with his
mistress and bit her hand. The incident attracted a laureate on the
staff of the _California Chronicle_, who, in Silas Wegg fashion,
"dropped into verse:"

LOLA AND HER PET

One day when the season was drizzly,
And outside amusements were wet,
Fair Lola paid court to her Grizzly
And undertook petting her pet.

But, ah, it was not the Bavarian
Who softened so under her hand,
No ermined King octogenarian,
But Bruin, coarse cub of the land.

So, all her caresses combatting
He crushed her white slender hand first,
Refusing his love to her patting,
As she had refused hers to _Pat_!

Oh, had her pet been him whose glory
And title were won on the field,
Less bloodless had ended this story,
More easy her hand had been _Heald_!

This doggerel was signed "F.S.", initials which masked the identity of
Frank Soule, the editor of the _Chronicle_.

V

Never without her dog-whip, Lola took it with her to her cottage in
Grass Valley. There she soon found a use for it. A journalist, in a
column account of her career, was ungallant enough to finish by
enquiring "if she were the devil incarnate?" As the simplest method of
settling the problem, "Lola summoned the impertinent scribbler and
gave him such a hiding that he had no doubts left at all."

Shortly afterwards, there was trouble with another representative of
the press. This was with one Henley Shipley, the editor of the
_Marysville Herald_, who, notwithstanding that they were "regularly
attended by the _elite_ of the camp," had described her "Wednesday
soirees" as "disgraceful orgies, inimical to our fair repute."
Thereupon, says a sympathiser, the aspersed hostess "took her whip to
him, and handed out a number of stinging and well merited cuts."

The opportunity being too good to miss, the editor of the _Sacramento
Union_ set to work and rushed out a special edition, with a long
description of the incident:

This forenoon our town was plunged into a state of ludicrous
excitement by the spectacle of Madame Lola Montez rushing