underbrush. So, there, amid the murmur of boughs, go the Indian queen
and the Indian priest; while the gloom of the broad wilderness impends
over them, and its sombre mystery invests them as with something
preternatural; and only momentary streaks of quivering sunlight, once in
a great while, find their way down, and glimmer among the feathers in
their dusky hair. Can it be that the thronged street of a city will ever
pass into this twilight solitude,--over those soft heaps of the decaying
tree-trunks, and through the swampy places, green with water-moss, and
penetrate that hopeless entanglement of great trees, which have been
uprooted and tossed together by a whirlwind? It has been a wilderness
from the creation. Must it not be a wilderness forever?

Here an acidulous-looking gentleman in blue glasses, with bows of Berlin
steel, who has taken a seat at the extremity of the front row, begins, at
this early stage of the exhibition, to criticise.

"The whole affair is a manifest catchpenny!" observes he, scarcely under
his breath. "The trees look more like weeds in a garden than a primitive
forest; the Squaw Sachem and Wappacowet are stiff in their pasteboard
joints; and the squirrels, the deer, and the wolf move with all the
grace of a child's wooden monkey, sliding up and down a stick."

"I am obliged to you, sir, for the candor of your remarks," replies the
showman, with a bow. "Perhaps they are just. Human art has its limits,
and we must now and then ask a little aid from the spectator's
imagination."

"You will get no such aid from mine," responds the critic. "I make it a
point to see things precisely as they are. But come! go ahead! the stage
is waiting!"