Marie Antoinette to the scaffold. He had come
at last to take her, she thought, shrinking in her
inmost soul. She was to be arrested for running
away, and trying to sell her locket!

"You little imbecile," cried a fat cattle-dealer
from Poissy, who had followed close on her
heels, and giving her, as he spoke, a slight push
with his umbrella, "you foolish child, don't you
see that ce cuistre à ceinture jaune is only wax-
work?"

The cattle-dealer had paid his ten sous before,
and often, and knew the ways of men and wax-
work shows. He was chuckling at his penetration,
when the voice of Signor Ventimillioni
was heard in a shrill treble, frantically shrieking:

"Les armes et les parapluies sont déposés à
la porte—weapons and umbrellas must be left
at the door. Advance, messieurs et mesdames.
Advance, I supplicate you."

The cattle-dealer turned back, grumbling, to
give up his gingham; but Lily advanced. The
show soon made her feel very faint. It smelt
oppressively of lukewarm wax, and sawdust, and
old clothes. Apart from the good King Henry
the Fourth, Monsieur de Voltaire, Napoleon
Bonaparte, and Sir Hudson Lowe (who was
aptly represented in a yellow cloak lined with
leopard's skin, the well-known uniform of
general officers in the British army), the collection
was mainly composed of eminent murderers.
Louvet was there, holding, of course, the identical
poniard with which he slew the Duke of Berry.
Next him Avril, and Lacenaire, who with a
bottle of Chambertin before him was represented
as absorbed in the composition of a sonnet.
Fieschi with his arm shattered, and his face all
dabbled with blood; the personages in the Affair
Fualdès, playing boston at a gory card-table;
Pontis de Sainte-Helène in the fetters and red
nightcap of a Toulon galley-slave; the Bergère
d'lvry—for there were victims here as well as
assassins—with her throat cut, and the Courier
of Lyons with a bullet through his head. Horror!

"Call that Madame Lafarge?" the cattle-
dealer from Poissy was heard to murmur as he
halted before the effigy of a fashionably-dressed
lady wearing a white chip bonnet and a black
lace veil. "It is an infamy, an imposture! Je
te reconnais, coquine. Thou hast not been to
the fair of Poissy for nothing. Two years since
thou wert Charlotte Corday; last July thou
wert the Duchess of Berry previous to her
betrayal by the Jew Deubz, and now, affublée
d'un nouveau cotillon, and that gimcrack bonnet
on thy head, thou must pass, forsooth, for the
Veuve Lafarge, née Marie Capelle. C'est une
supercherie inouïe. I demand my money back.
I have a great mind to beat thy waxen head off,
fraudulent puppet." It was evident that the
confiscation of his umbrella still rankled in the
cattle-dealer's mind.

Forth again into the Babel of money-making
went Lily. She had had enough of shows for
the time. Where was she to pass the night?
How shamefully she had loitered her time away!
How recklessly she had been squandering her
slender stock of money! But she could not
muster up courage enough to flee the enchanted
ground. It had a strange and deadly fascination
for her, and, like a moth round a candle,
she felt she must continue to hover about it:
even to her destruction.

She absolutely, before it was quite dark, went
to see another show. It is true that this was
a humble spectacle, and only cost five sous. The
attraction was a solitary one: there was but a
wild woman to be seen.

"La femme sauvage—la femme sauvage!—
the wild woman!" cried, with stentorian lungs,
the orator, in a full suit of armour and a hussar's
busby, from the platform in front of the booth.
"The wild woman from Madagascar, the largest
of the group known as the Inexorable Islands.
Her name is Antannariva Zoraïde. The
idolatrous practices of her ancestors she has abjured,
and is a good Christian, wearing three medals
blessed by le Saint Père the Pope, who sent to
Rome for her expressly to bestow his patronage
and benediction upon her; but she lives entirely
on raw meat, and neither threats nor persuasion
can induce her to wear stays. The wild woman!
Ladies and gentlemen! This is her last appearance
in France. Reconciled to her illustrious
family, she leaves to-morrow morning for
Madagascar by the Messageries Royales of Messrs.
Lafitte and Caillard, stopping only at Lisbon
in order to be presented to the infants and
infantas of the House of Braganza. The wild
woman, messieurs les amateurs! Her
disposition is amiable, and her tastes are artistic.
She can lift a weight of one hundred and fifty
kilogrammes with the little finger of her right
hand, and suffer a pastille to burn to charcoal
on the tip of her tongue. En avant for the wild
woman. Admission only five sous, a reduction,
of eight hundred per cent in consequence of la
cherté des denrées—the high price of provisions.
Nobody can enter without paying, but paying
without entering is permitted by the civil and
military authorities."

The crowd, who had been listening to this
balderdash with a grin of bewildered
complacency, burst into a roar of laughter at the
concluding witticism. There was a press of
sight-seers at once to the ladder. That prodigal
little Lily, after gazing for a while at the violently
chromatic portraits of the Wild Woman
strangling a Tigress; the Wild Woman riding
three wilder horses at once; the Wild Woman
in the wilds of her native Madagascar, taking
refuge in the branches of a banyan-tree from
the pursuit of the hunters; the Wild Woman
kissing the Pope's toe; the Wild Woman lifting
ponderous weights, firing off pistols, and
defeating the celebrated Monsieur Grisier in a
fencing match—after contemplating these
astounding works of art, the desolate little girl
wandered into the show, which was now lit by a
hoop of flaring oil lamps suspended from the
centre pole of the tent, and took her seat with
some twenty others on the last of a row of planks
placed on trestles.

There was a little proscenium and a rude set-
scene supposed to represent Madagascar. On