information which is said to be one of my chief charms in the social
circle, and on several occasions has led that portion of the public
immediately about the Happy Family into the erroneous impression that
I was Mr. Barnum glibly explaining his five hundred thousand
curiosities.

On the present occasion we found several visitors of the better class
in the room devoted to the aquarium. Among these was a young lady,
apparently about nineteen, in a tight-fitting basque of black velvet,
which showed her elegant figure to fine advantage, a skirt of garnet
silk, looped up over a pretty Balmoral, and the daintiest imaginable
pair of kid walking-boots. Her height was a trifle over the medium;
her eyes, 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 as 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.