when they get to the top finger. His white mice live in a
little pagoda of gaily-painted wirework, designed and made by himself.
They are almost as tame as the canaries, and they are perpetually let
out like the canaries. They crawl all over him, popping in and out of
his waistcoat, and sitting in couples, white as snow, on his capacious
shoulders. He seems to be even fonder of his mice than of his other
pets, smiles at them, and kisses them, and calls them by all sorts of
endearing names. If it be possible to suppose an Englishman with any
taste for such childish interests and amusements as these, that
Englishman would certainly feel rather ashamed of them, and would be
anxious to apologise for them, in the company of grown-up people. But
the Count, apparently, sees nothing ridiculous in the amazing contrast
between his colossal self and his frail little pets. He would blandly
kiss his white mice and twitter to his canary-birds amid an assembly of
English fox-hunters, and would only pity them as barbarians when they
were all laughing their loudest at him.

It seems hardly credible while I am writing it down, but it is
certainly true, that this same man, who has all the fondness of an old
maid for his cockatoo, and all the small dexterities of an organ-boy in
managing his white mice, can talk, when anything happens to rouse him,
with a daring independence of thought, a knowledge of books in every
language, and an experience of society in half the capitals of Europe,
which would make him the prominent personage of any assembly in the
civilised world. This trainer of canary-birds, this architect of a
pagoda for white mice, is (as Sir Percival himself has told me) one of
the first experimental chemists living, and has discovered, among other
wonderful inventions, a means of petrifying the body after death, so as
to preserve it, as hard as marble, to the end of time. This fat,
indolent, elderly man, whose nerves are so finely strung that he starts
at chance noises, and winces when he sees a house-spaniel get a
whipping, went into the stable-yard on the morning after his arrival,
and put his hand on the head of a chained bloodhound--a beast so savage
that the very groom who feeds him keeps out of his reach. His wife and
I were present, and I shall not forget the scene that followed, short
as it was.

"Mind that dog, sir," said the groom; "he flies at everybody!" "He does
that, my friend," replied the Count quietly,