a "hard"
type in the witness-box in an American city. She glared round at the
judge, the jury, and the spectators, and then burst out with, "You
needn't all be staring at me in that way. I don't keer a --- for you
all. I've lived eleven years in Chicago, and ain't affeard of the
devil." Chicago is said in Indian to mean the place of skunks, but
calling a rose a skunk-cabbage don't make it one.

Walking on the edge of the lake near the city, the waters cast up a good-
sized living specimen of that extraordinary fish-lizard, the great
_menobranchus_, popularly known as the hell-bender from its extreme
ugliness. Owing to the immense size of its spermatozoa, it has rendered
great aid to embryology, a science which, when understood _au fond_, will
bring about great changes in the human race. We were taken out in a
steamboat to the end of the great aqueduct, which was, when built,
pronounced, I think by the London _Times_, to be the greatest engineering
work of modern times.

In due time we came to St. Paul, Minnesota. We went to a very fair hotel
and had a very good dinner. In the West it is very common among the
commonalty to drink coffee and milk through dinner, and indeed with all
meals, instead of wine or ale, but the custom is considered as vulgar by
swells. Having finished dessert, I asked the Irish waiter to bring me a
small cup of black coffee and brandy. Drawing himself up stiffly, Pat
replied, "We don't serve caafy at dinner in _this_ hotel." There was a
grand roar of laughter which the waiter evidently thought was at _my_
expense, as he retreated smiling.

We were kindly received in St. Paul by everybody. There is this immense
advantage of English or American hospitality over that of all other
countries, that it introduces us to the _home_, and makes us forget that
we are strangers. When we were at the end of the fearfully wearisome
great moral circus known as the Oriental Congress, held all over
Scandinavia in 1890, there came to me one evening in the station a great
Norseman with his friends. With much would-be, ox-like dignity he began,
"You ha-ave now experienced de glorious haspitality off our country. You
will go oom and say--"

"Stop a minute there!" I exclaimed, for I was bored to death with a show
which had been engineered to tatters, and to half defeating all the work
of the Congress, in order to glorify the King and Count Landberg. "I
have been here in your country six weeks, and I h