Here, unlike a menagerie, the animals all have room for the comforts of existence. The rhinoceroses have a pond in which to stand in the mud, and the hippopotami may sport as in their native rivers.
The British Museum, with its Roman sculptures, Elgin marbles, and almost innumerable classic antiquities, and St. Paul’s with its fifty monuments of England’s heroes and benefactors, presented to the Class an extended view of the world’s history. Sight-seeing became almost bewildering, and when it was asked what place they next should visit, Tommy Toby replied,—
“I feel as though I had seen almost enough.”
“Let us visit Madame Tussaud’s wax works,” said Master Lewis.
“Are they like Mrs. Jarley’s ‘wax figgers?’” said Tommy; “if so I would like to go. Who was Madame Tussaud?”
“She was a little French lady who took casts of faces of great men, sometimes after their death or execution, and who died herself some twenty or more years ago, at the age of ninety years.”
The price of the exhibition was a shilling, and—
“For the Chamber of Horrors a sixpence hextra,” said the man admitting the party. Each one paid the “hextra” sixpence.
There were three hundred figures in all, supposed to be exact representations of the persons when living. In a room called the Hall of Kings were fifty figures of kings and queens, reproducing to the life these generally condemned players on the stage of English history.
A clever, winsome old man sat on one of the benches in the place, holding a programme in his hand, and now and then raising his head, as from studying the paper, to scrutinize one or another of the astonishing works of art.