ight-fitting basque of black velvet,
which showed her elegant figure to fine advantage, a skirt of garnet
silk, looped up over a pretty Balmoral, and the daintiest imaginable
pair of kid walking-boots. Her height was a trifle over the medium; her
eyes a soft, expressive brown, shaded by masses of hair which exactly
matched their color, and, at that rat-and-miceless day fell in such
graceful abandon as to show at once that nature was the only maid who
crimped their waves into them. Her complexion was rosy with health and
sympathetic enjoyment; her mouth was faultless, her nose sensitive, her
manners full of refinement, and her voice musical as a wood-robin's,
when she spoke to the little boy of six at her side, to whom she was
revealing the palace of the great show-king. Billy and I were
flattening our noses against the abode of the balloon-fish, and
determining whether he looked most like a horse-chestnut burr or a ripe
cucumber, when his eyes and my own simultaneously fell on the child and
lady, In a moment, to Billy, the balloon-fish was as though he had not
been.

"That's a pretty little boy!" said I. And then I asked Billy one of
those senseless routine questions which must make children look at us,
regarding the scope of our intellects very much as we look at Bushmen.

"How would you like to play with him?"

"Him!" replied Billy, scornfully, "that's his first pair of boots; see
him pull up his little breeches to show the red tops to 'em! But,
crackey! isn't _she_ a smasher!"

After that we visited the wax figures and the sleepy snakes, the learned
seal and the glass-blowers. Whenever we passed from one room into
another, Billy could be caught looking anxiously to see if the pretty
girl and child were coming, too.

Time fails me to describe how Billy was lost in astonishment at the
Lightning Calculator,--wanted me to beg the secret of that prodigy for
him to do his sums by,--finally thought he had discovered it, and
resolved to keep his arm whirling all the time he studied his arithmetic
lesson the next morning. Equally inadequate is it to relate in full how
he became so confused among the wax-works that he pinched the solemnest
showman's legs to see if he was real, and perplexed the beautiful
Circassian to the verge of idiocy by telling her he had read all about
the way they sold girls like her in his geography.

We had reached the stairs to that subterranean chamber in which the
Behemoth of Holy Writ was wa