distresses me in Lilian. Lilian should not know him. How induce him to
leave L----? Ah, those experiments on which he asks my assistance! I
might commence them when he comes again, and then invent some excuse
tosend him for completer tests to the famous chemists of Paris or Berlin."




CHAPTER XXXI.

It is the night of the mayor's ball! The guests are assembling fast;
county families twelve miles round have been invited, as well as the
principal families of the town. All, before proceeding to the room set
apart for the dance, moved in procession through the museum,--homage to
science before pleasure!

The building was brilliantly lighted, and the effect was striking, perhaps
because singular and grotesque. There, amidst stands of flowers and
evergreens, lit up with coloured lamps, were grouped the dead
representatives of races all inferior--some deadly--to man. The fancy of
the ladies had been permitted to decorate and arrange these types of the
animal world. The tiger glared with glass eyes from amidst artificial
reeds and herbage, as from his native jungle; the grisly white bear peered
from a mimic iceberg. There, in front, stood the sage elephant, facing a
hideous hippopotamus; whilst an anaconda twined its long spire round the
stem of some tropical tree in zinc. In glass cases, brought into full
light by festooned lamps, were dread specimens of the reptile
race,--scorpion and vampire, and cobra capella, with insects of gorgeous
hues, not a few of them with venomed stings.