“That’s a pretty little boy!” said I. And then I asked Billy one of those senseless routine questions which must make children look at us, regarding the scope of our intellects very much as we look at Bushmen.

“How would you like to play with him?”

“Him!” replied Billy, scornfully, “that’s his first pair of boots; see him pull up his little breeches to show the red tops to ’em!  But, crackey! isn’t she a smasher!”

After that we visited the wax figures and the sleepy snakes, the learned seal and the glass-blowers.  Whenever we passed from one room into another, Billy could be caught looking anxiously to see if the pretty girl and child were coming, too.

Time fails me to describe how Billy was lost in astonishment at the Lightning Calculator,—­wanted me to beg the secret of that prodigy for him to do his sums by,—­finally thought he had discovered it, and resolved to keep his arm whirling all the time he studied his arithmetic lesson the next morning.  Equally inadequate is it to relate in full how he became so confused among the wax-works that he pinched the solemnest showman’s legs to see if he was real, and perplexed the beautiful Circassian to the verge of idiocy by telling her he had read all about the way they sold girls like her in his geography.

We had reached the stairs to that subterranean chamber in which the Behemoth of Holy Writ was wallowing about without a thought of the dignity which one expects from a canonical character.  Billy had always languished upon his memories of this diverting beast, and I stood ready to see him plunge headlong the moment that he read the sign-board at the head of the stairs.  When he paused and hesitated there, not seeming at all anxious to go down till he saw the pretty girl and the child following after,—­a sudden intuition flashed across me.  Could it be possible that Billy was caught in that vortex which whirled me down at ten years,—­a little boy’s first love?

We were lingering about the elliptical basin, and catching occasional glimpses between bubbles of a vivified hair trunk of monstrous compass, whose knobby lid opened at one end and showed a red morocco lining, when the pretty girl, in leaning over to point out the rising monster, dropped into the water one of her little gloves, and the swash made by the hippopotamus drifted it close under Billy’s hand.  Either in play or as a mere coincidence the animal followed it.  The other children about the tank screamed and started back as he bumped his nose against the side; but Billy manfully bent down and grabbed the glove not an inch from one of his big tusks, then marched around the tank and presented it to the lady with a chivalry of manner in one of his years quite surprising.

“That’s a real nice boy,—­you said so, didn’t you, Lottie?—­and I wish he’d come and play with me,” said the little fellow by the young lady’s side, as Billy turned away, gracefully thanked, to come back to me with his cheeks roseate with blushes.