pleasure
I had experienced by giving me an account--two hours long, and with
equal unction--of a tremendous controversy then raging as to the proper
form of electing the sub-patriarch of Cairo. It would have been
ungrateful to interrupt him, although there seemed no end to his
garrulity. Fortunately, two or three people at length came in; I
compromised my dignity as a heretic by kissing his hand, and escaped, to
turn over this curious story in my mind. Next day I went to the Greek
church, and saw a melancholy-looking face through the bars of the
cage-like gallery in which the women sit. I am quite certain it was that
of Lady Silver-Voice, but no one whom I asked seemed to know her. The
boy did not show himself. It was my intention to go another Sunday, and
observe more accurately, for I really felt a deep interest in this
unfortunate lady. But other thoughts and occupations came upon me, and
it was only by an accident that, as I have said, these circumstances
recurred last night to my mind.

THE CROCODILE BATTERY.

In the summer of 1846, when every body in England was crazy with railway
gambling, I was sojourning on the banks of the Rohan, a small stream in
one of the northwestern provinces of India. Here I first became
acquainted, with the Mugger, or Indian crocodile. I had often before
leaving England, seen, in museums, stuffed specimens of the animal, and
had read in "Voyages and Travels," all sorts of horrible and incredible
stories concerning them. I had a lively recollection of Waterton riding
close to the water's edge on the back of an American cayman, and I had a
confused notion of sacred crocodiles on the banks of the Nile. I always
felt more or less inclined to regard the whole race as having affinities
with Sinbad's "roc," and the wild men of the woods, who only refrained
from speaking for fear of being made to work.

My ideas respecting the natural history of crocodiles were in this stage
of development when, one day, while paddling up the Rohan, I saw what
appeared to be a half-burned log of wood lying on a sand-bank. I paddled
close up to it. To my astonishment, it proved to be a huge reptile. The
old stories of dragons, griffins, and monsters, seemed no longer fables;
the speculations of geologists concerning, _mososaurians, hylaesaurians,_
and _plesiosaurians_, were no longer dreams. There, in all his scaly
magnificence, was a _real_ saurian, nearly eighteen feet long. For a
while I stood gazi