ever learned of them was, to be silent when they spoke." "But what's to be done now?" demands the disconsolate man. "Send for the little women who understand stuffing, and take their advice." "So we went," continued the old woman, "and were personally introduced to this lion." "_Ah! che Leone!_" interrupted the daughter, laughing at the recollection of the quizzical beast. "A _lion_ indeed!" said the mother laughing, but less boisterously than her daughter. "What a king of the forest!" said the girl, going off again into inextinguishable merriment: "mother, do you remember his eyes sunk in his head as if he had died of a decline, his chest pinched in to correspond, his belly bulging out like the pouch of an opossum, with all her family at home, his mouth twisted into a sardonic grin, his teeth like some old dowager, one row overlapping the other, his cheeks inflated as if his stomach was in his mouth, and then the position of one of his fore-legs, evidently copied from that of the old bronze _horse_ on the Capitol, while his tail wound three times and a half round its own tip!" "_Basta, basta!_" said the old woman, "he _was_ a queer lion, and looked easy enough to kill if you could only keep your gravity while you attacked him." "And what said the Consul?" asked we, laughing with them. "The Consul _cospettoed_ again and again, and was for knocking him off his legs at once, and then giving him to us to re-arrange. 'You and your daughter,' said he, 'will take him home and do what you can for me;' but we told him plainly, that to expect a new birth, after such a miscarriage as this, was only to indulge a vain hope, sure to issue in new disappointment. Why, the very tail would have taken us a fortnight to uncurl and make a _lion's_ tail of it; the ears were quite past redemption; the _bustle_ might have been removed from behind, and the wadding placed in front, where it was wanted; but the hide itself was corrugated into plaits that nothing could have removed. '_Cospetto!_' said the Consul, _poveretto_, who had nothing else to say--'and am I thus to lose my lion, the only lion I ever killed, and such a fine lion too!' and then he fell to abusing the Frenchman. 'I can't keep him here to show my friends,' pursued he; 'for it is obvious, if I do, that instead of admiring my courage, they will only ridicule me, and perhaps betray me into the hands of that rogue _Pinelli_ as a fit subject for his caricature.' We could not say they would not; so we recommended him, upon the whole, as the best thing under the misfortune, to _re_-consult the French artist. '_Scelarato porco!_ consult him about a lion? why the commonest daub on a _Trattoria_ sign-board gives a better idea of the noble animal than this." "It is difficult to stuff a lion," said the girl, half apologetically: "one cost me a fortnight's hard work to prepare." "Yes," added the mother eagerly--"yes, but he looked like a lion, he did."