"Eh, sacredieu!" he cried, shaking his fist in Müller's face, "I've not done with you yet, diable de galérien!"
Whereupon there burst forth a general roar--a roar like the "inextinguishable laughter" of Olympus.
"Tiens!" said Müller, "his majesty speaks French almost as well as I speak Ashantee!"
"Bourreau! Brigand! Assassin!" shrieked his Ferocity, as his friends hustled him off the stage.
The curtains then fell together again; and the audience, still laughing vociferously, dispersed with cries of "Vive Caraba Rodokala!" "Kind remembrances to the Queens of Ashantee!" "What's the latest news from home?" "Borriobooloo-bah--ah--ah!"
Elbowing our way out with the crowd, we now plunged once more into the press of the fair. Here our old friends the dancing dogs of the Champs Elysées, and the familiar charlatan of the Place du Châtelet with his chariot and barrel-organ, transported us from Ashantee to Paris. Next we came to a temporary shooting-gallery, adorned over the entrance with a spirited cartoon of a Tyrolean sharpshooter; and then to an exhibition of cosmoramas; and presently to a weighing machine, in which a great, rosy-cheeked, laughing Normandy peasant girl, with her high cap, blue skirt, massive gold cross and heavy ear-rings, was in the act of being weighed.
"Tiens! Mam'selle est joliment solide!" remarks a saucy bystander, as the owner of the machine piles on weight after weight.
"Perhaps if I had no more brains than m'sieur, I should weigh as light!" retorts the damsel, with a toss of her high cap.
"Pardon! it is not a question of brains--it is a question of hearts," interposes an elderly exquisite in a white hat. "Mam'selle has captured so many that she is completely over weighted."
"Twelve stone six ounces," pronounces the owner of the machine, adjusting the last weight.