that the old gentleman hail a temper of his
own, and was not inclined to brook indignity
with meekness.

"I didn't do anything of the sort, mum,"
quoth the old gentleman, with rising wrath, on
the charge being repeated.

"Sir, you are gross! you are brutal! you
are elephantine!" retorted the lady.

"Upon my word, I think the woman's mad,"
exclaimed the old gentleman. " I'm very glad
that I'm not your husband, mum."

"Insolent: again your horrible boots are
crushing my feet."

"Confound your feet!" screamed the old
gentleman, in a fury. "I never touched 'em.
Here, guard, guard, let me get out. And as
for you, my darling," he continued, turning to
Lily, " I wish you joy of your grandmother, and
I wouldn't be in your shoes for something.
Good morning, mum, and a more Christian
temper to you!" And so saying, the old gentleman
got out in dudgeon at the southern foot of
Westminster-bridge.

They went on without any more adventures
to the Golden-cross, Charing-cross, where they
alighted. The lady and her charge swept away,
and the coachman and the guard both turned
their heads to look at them.

"Fine woman, Bill," observed the coachman.

"Good stepper!" agreed the guard; "stunning
action and rattling pace. But ra-a-ther a
kicker; eh, Josh?"

"I shouldn't like to be the splashboard," replied
the coachman, " that she was in the
pheayton of. Kick! She'd kick the Tower of
London into toothpicks. Good 'un to bite, too,
I should think. Say nothin' of rearin' and
plungin'. She's a real live woman, Bill, and no
mistake."

The subject of this criticism had hold pretty
tightly of Lily's hand, and walked with her a
few paces eastward. Then she stooped, and
said:

"Ah! you've just come from school: you'd
like to be amused, wouldn't you?"

It was certain that Lily hadn't been very
much amused up to that moment; and she saw
but little chance of recreation in the company
of this very strange lady. She murmured
something, however, which the hearer might
construe pretty much as she chose; and the lady,
electing to take the words as a sign of
acquiescence, proceeded to amuse Lily.

She took her first into the Adelaide Gallery,
which was then a kind of Polytechnic Institution,
and crowded with numbers of models, and
skeletons, and maps, and drawings, all supposed
to conduce towards a knowledge of science
among the million. The million were there, in
the shape of many old ladies in beaver bonnets,
and school-children, and raw bumpkins, and persons
of the country-cousin order, generally.
They poked their fingers into the models, and
peered between the decks of the pretty toy-
ships to see where the captain's cabin was, and
gave themselves galvanic shocks, at which they
danced, and— the younger ones— howled
dismally. Then they inhaled doses of laughing
gas. And then they had a stocking-weaving
machine, and a steam-gun, explained to them,
and tried hard to look as though they understood
those scientific inventions. Subsequently
Lily looked through a number of little round
holes, and saw some very brilliant pictures,
which, she was told, represented Lisbon,
Chandernagore, Manilla, and the like: at the which
she clapped her hands in not unfamiliar glee, for
a man with a peep-show had once been admitted
to the playground of Rhododendron House.
The Bunnycastles took care to put his
entertainment, in the bills of the five-and-thirty
boarders, under the head of "Admission to a
geographical and pictorial exhibition." Then,
at the ringing of a bell, they were conducted
into a dark room, where an unseen gentleman
with a hollow voice, as from the tombs, delivered
a lecture, the preliminary part of which
was so dreary and so full of long words, that it
almost made Lily cry; and then he exhibited on
an illuminated tablecloth, something that was
like the spider at Rhododendron House, only
magnified eight hundred million times; and to
this strange presentment he gave a name to
which that of rhododendron was monosyllabic.
There was another lecture in another room from
a pleasant gentleman with a bald head and a
north country accent, who was surrounded by
bottles and glasses, and poured the contents of
one phial into another, and turned green water
into red, and popped little twisted pieces of tow
into them, whereupon they caught fire, and who
seemed to be trying his very hardest to blow himself
up — which, indeed, in his ardour for science,
he did, on an average, once in six months. " A
pleace the fiin's oonder the receiver, and boobles
of gass weell arise," quoth the bald-headed gentleman;
and then bubbles of gas did arise, and
there was a sharp crackling noise,and the audience
clapped their hands, till another bell rang, and
everybody ran off to see a patent potter's wheel,
supposed to make any number of cups and
saucers, elaborately painted, by merely touching
a spring, but which habitually confined itself to
spattering cascades of white mud upon the
clothes of the spectators. Lily was delighted
with everything, only somewhat confused, and
the lecture with the magnified spider and the
long name decidedly frightened her.

She was not sorry when, it being about three
o'clock in the afternoon, they went out into the
Strand again. The lady had swept through the
Adelaide Gallery in the disdainful manner customary
with her, and now and again sternly reprehending
strangers for crowding upon her, or
treading on the skirts of her robe. The country
cousins, however, did not seem to mind her
much, and one of them was venturous enough
to ask if, the room not being big enough for her,
she thought St. Paul's would be? Whereupon
she tossed her head and looked Perkins's steam-
guns at him. She condescended, however, to
laugh at the galvanic shocks the cousins gave
themselves, and remarked that the invention
was droll.