e? True! Margrave
with his wild notions, his strange beauty!--true--true--he might
dangerously encourage that turn for the mystic and visionary which
distresses me in Lilian. Lilian should not know him. How induce him to
leave L----? Ah, those experiments on which he asks my assistance! I
might commence them when he comes again, and then invent some excuse
tosend him for completer tests to the famous chemists of Paris or
Berlin."

CHAPTER XXXI.

It is the night of the mayor's ball! The guests are assembling fast;
county families twelve miles round have been invited, as well as the
principal families of the town. All, before proceeding to the room set
apart for the dance, moved in procession through the museum,--homage to
science before pleasure!

The building was brilliantly lighted, and the effect was striking,
perhaps because singular and grotesque. There, amidst stands of flowers
and evergreens, lit up with coloured lamps, were grouped the dead
representatives of races all inferior--some deadly--to man. The fancy of
the ladies had been permitted to decorate and arrange these types of the
animal world. The tiger glared with glass eyes from amidst artificial
reeds and herbage, as from his native jungle; the grisly white bear
peered from a mimic iceberg. There, in front, stood the sage elephant,
facing a hideous hippopotamus; whilst an anaconda twined its long spire
round the stem of some tropical tree in zinc. In glass cases, brought
into full light by festooned lamps, were dread specimens of the reptile
race,--scorpion and vampire, and cobra capella, with insects of gorgeous
hues, not a few of them with venomed stings.

But the chief boast of the collection was in the varieties of the
Genus Simia,--baboons and apes, chimpanzees, with their human visage,
mockeries of man, from the dwarf monkeys perched on boughs lopped from
the mayor's shrubberies, to the formidable ourangoutang, leaning on his
huge club.

Every one expressed to the mayor admiration, to each other antipathy,
for this unwonted and somewhat ghastly, though instructive, addition to
the revels of a ballroom.

Margrave, of course, was there, and seemingly quite at home, gliding
from group to group of gayly-dressed ladies, and brilliant with
a childish eagerness to play off the showman. Many of these grim
fellow-creatures he declared he had seen, played, or fought with. He
had something true or false to say about each. In his high spirits he
c