The pavement of the whole edifice is made of colored marble, and, as you see, the interior is heavily decorated with carving and statuary.  Much of this is bronze and gold.

But if you should mount (and there are stairs by which you may make the ascent) into the cupola at the top of the dome, and look down into the vast church, and see the people crawling about like little insects so far below you, you would perhaps understand better than at any other time that it is not at all surprising that this church should be one of the wonders of the world.

If we ever go to Europe, we must not fail to see St. Peter’s Church at Rome.

THE SOFT PLACE.

There was once a young Jaguar (he was very intimately related to the Panther family, as you may remember), and he sat upon a bit of hard rock, and cogitated.  The subject of his reflections was very simple indeed, for it was nothing more nor less than this—­where should he get his supper?

He would not have cared so much for his supper, if it had been that he had had no dinner, and even this would not have made so much difference if he had had his breakfast.  But in truth he had eaten nothing all day.

During the summer of that year the meat-markets in that section of the country were remarkably bad.  It was sometimes difficult for a panther or a wildcat to find enough food to keep her family at all decently, and there were cases of great destitution.  In years before there had been plenty of deer, wild turkey, raccoons, and all sorts of good things, but they were very scarce now.  This was not the first time that our young Jaguar had gone hungry for a whole day.

While he thus sat, wondering where he should go to get something to eat, he fell asleep, and had a dream.  And this is what he dreamed.

He dreamed that he saw on the grass beneath the rock where he was lying five fat young deer.  Three of them were sisters, and the other two were cousins.  They were discussing the propriety of taking a nap on the grass by the river-bank, and one of them had already stretched herself out.  “Now,” thought the Jaguar in his dream, “shall I wait until they all go to sleep, and then pounce down softly and kill them all, or shall I spring on that one on the ground and make sure of a good supper at any rate?” While he was thus deliberating in his mind which it would be best for him to do, the oldest cousin cocked up her ears as if she heard something, and just as the Jaguar was going to make a big spring and get one out of the family before they took to their heels, he woke up!

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