But not only is Leadville not "rough;" it is even flirting with the refinements of life. It has an opera-house, a good drive for evening recreation, and a florist's shop. There were not many plants in it, it is true, but they were nearly all of them of the pleasant old English kinds--geraniums, pansies, pinks, and mignonette. Two other shops interested me, one stocked with mineral specimens--malachite, agate, amethyst, quartz, blood-stone, onyx, and an infinite variety of pieces of ore, gold, silver, lead, iron, copper, bismuth, and sulphur--with which pretty settings are made, of a quaint grotto-work kind, for clocks and inkstands. The other a naturalist's shop, in which, besides fossils, exquisite leaves in stone and petrified tree-fragments, I found the commencement of a zoological collection--the lynx with its comfortable snow-coat on, and the grey mountain wolf not less cozily dressed; squirrels, black and grey, "the creatures that sit in the shade of their tails," and the "friends of Hiawatha" with various birds--the sage hen and the prairie chicken, the magpie (very like the English bird), and the "lark,"--a very inadequate substitute indeed for the bird that "at Heaven's gate sings," that has been sanctified to all time by Shelley, and the idol of the poets of the Old World--and heads of large game, horned and antlered, and the skin of a "lion." It is a curious fact that every country should thus insist on having a lion. For the real African animal himself I entertain only a very qualified respect. For some of his substitutes, the panther of Sumatra and the Far East, the (now extinct) cat of Australia, and the puma of the United States, that respect is even more moderate in degree. "The American lion" is, in fact, about as much like the original article as the American "muffin" is like the seductive but saddening thing from which it takes its name. The puma, which is its proper name, is the least imposing of all the larger cats. It cannot compare even with the jaguar, and would not be recognized by the true lion, or by the tiger, as being a kinsman. It is just as true of lions as it is of Glenfield starch--"when you ask for it, see that you get it." I admit that it is very creditable to America that in the great competition of nations she should insist on not being left behind even in the matter of lions, but surely it would be more becoming to her vast resources and her undeniable enterprise if she imported some of the genuine breed, instead of, as at present, putting up with such a shabby compromise as the puma.