TARAN-TARANTARA! rub-a-dub-dub! play up horn! roll drum! a quarter to
eight; and the crowd already thick before Rugge's Grand Exhibition,--"
Remorseless Baron and Bandit's Child! Young Phenomenon,--Juliet
Araminta,--Patronized by the Nobility in general, and expecting daily to
be summoned to perform before the Queen,--/Vivat Regina!/"--Ruba-dub-
dub! The company issue from the curtain, range in front of the
proscenuim. Splendid dresses. The Phenomenon!--'t is she!

"My eyes, there's a beauty!" cries the clown.

The days have already grown somewhat shorter; but it is not yet dusk.
How charmingly pretty she still is, despite that horrid paint; but how
wasted those poor bare snowy arms!

A most doleful lugubrious dirge mingles with the drum and horn. A man
has forced his way close by the stage,--a man with a confounded cracked
hurdy-gurdy. Whine! whine! creaks the hurdy-gurdy. "Stop that! stop
that mu-zeek!" cries a delicate apprentice, clapping his hands to his
ears. "Pity a poor blind--" answers the man with the hurdygurdy.

"Oh, you are blind, are you? but we are not deaf. There's a penny not
to play. What black thing have you got there by a string?"

"My dog, sir!"

"Deuced ugly one; not like a dog; more like a bear with horns!"

"I say, master," cries the clown, "here's a blind man come to see the
Phenomenon!"