Infatuated lizard! Wretched fly! Betrayed pussy! _She_ heeded not the sly creep of the dog, so intent was she upon the successful issue of her spring upon the lizard. The fly was gorging himself with honey. He alone partook not of the intense anxiety of the lizard, the cat, and the dog. He partook only of—_honey_! The crisis at length arrived. The lizard made its nimble pounce at the fly. The cat sprang at the lizard. The lizard missed its footing in consequence, and would have been the cat’s portion—fly, honey, and all—but for the dog’s sudden attack upon puss. Here was a scene! The lizard falling to the ground, was at once involved in the consequences of the quarrel between the dog and cat. What were fly or honey to him at the moment, when in a state between life and death he crept back sore and wounded to his chinks and cobwebs! The fly might or might not have escaped. Not so the cat, now sorely worried by the dog, in spite of all her outcries and all she could do in the way of biting and clawing; for it was an old score the dog was paying her off, and that might soon have cost her her life, if her master had not rushed out of his shop with a broomstick, with which he began to belabour the dog. Now the owner of the dog had been as long at enmity with the man of flour and honey, as the dog had been at enmity with the cat, and probably longer. Of course, therefore, when he heard his animal’s cries, and saw the punishment inflicting, he armed himself with a broomstick also; and rushing across the street, gave the flour-dealer such a crack upon his head, as knocked him down as flat as a pancake. ‘Take that you villain,’ said he, ‘for it’s a debt I’ve long owed you!’ ‘Have you?’ said the flour-dealer’s son, as he rushed out with a cudgel in his hand. ‘Then tell me how you like _that_’—giving him such a hearty whack across the shoulders, that he was fain to drop his broomstick. Yet the blow had hardly been given, before a friend of the dog’s master ran up with a drawn sword, and would have made mincemeat of the flour-dealer’s son, but for a soldier who cried out, ‘Shame, thou coward, and son of a coward, who would attack a youth with only a stick in his hand, and you armed with a sword! Shame on you! It’s just like you rascally Hindoo fellows, who pretend to be soldiers, and are as much like soldiers as that poor cat. Why don’t you try me?’ ‘Why not?’ replied the man. ‘Do you think I’m afraid of such a bully as you? Come on, you scoundrel, and I’ll show you what difference there is between a cat and a Hindoo!’ Upon this the soldier drew his sword, and both began to cut at each other in good earnest.