daubs to Titians, as pigmies to
Titans. If in those first days the girl had been called upon to do
the seven bendings and the nine knockings before the one New York
institution which impressed her most profoundly, she undoubtedly
would have singled out one of those mastodons a-bossing everything
and everybody, with a prize-ham paw.

She was cold to the Woolworth Building, as indifferent to the
Sherman monument as Mr. Chadwick Champneys was acridly averse to it,
and not at all interested in the Public Library. The Museum of
Natural History failed to win any applause from her; the
Metropolitan Museum bored her interminably, there was so much of it.
Most of the antiquities she thought so much junk, and the Egyptian
and Assyrian remains were so obviously the plunder of old graveyards
that she couldn't for the life of her understand why anybody should
wish to keep them above ground.

Mr. Champneys explained, patiently. He wished, by way of aiding and
abetting the education he had in view for her, to arouse her
interest in these remains of a lost and vanished world.

She stood by the glass case that contains the old brown mummied
priest with his shaven skull, his long, narrow feet, his flattened
nose and fleshless hands, and the mark of the embalmer's stone knife
still visible upon his poor old empty stomach. And she didn't like
him at all. There was something grisly and repellent to her in the
idea that living people should make of this poor old dead man a
spectacle for idle curiosity.

"There was a feller in our town used to keep stuffed snakes an'
monkeys an' birds, an' dried grasshoppers an' bugs an' things like
that in glass cases; but I never dreamed in all my born life that
anybody'd want to keep dried people," she commented disgustedly. "I
don't see no good in it: it's sickenin'." She turned her back upon
mummied Egypt with a gesture of aversion. "For Gawdsake let's go see
somethin' alive!"

He looked at her a bit helplessly. Plainly, this young person's
education wasn't to be tackled off-hand! Agreeably to her wishes he
took her to a certain famous shop filled at that hour with
fashionable women wonderfully groomed and gowned. Here, seated at a
small table, lingering over her ice-cream, Nancy was all observant
eyes and ears. Not being a woman, however, Mr. Champneys was not
aware that her proper education was distinctly under way.

A day or two later he took her to the Bronx Zoo. Here he caught a
glimpse of