es, 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 them! 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 the 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 waxworks 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 wallowing about without a thought of the
dignity which one expects from a canonical character. Billy had always
languished upon his memories of this diverting beast, and I stood ready
to see him plunge headlong the moment that he read the signboard at