As she lifts it and stands before us, I involuntarily draw back and get behind Jack, and Dolly gets behinds me; her ponderous foot shakes the boarding as she approaches, and her huge body oscillates from side to side, like a badly filled sack set upright in a cart. It is impossible to help feeling that if she happened to tread on one of us we should be crushed into pulp; for once report has not lied, and her picture has failed to do her charms justice, or represent her as she really is. "Look at 'er!" cries the showman in a voice of rapture, hitching up her already short petticoats with his cane, and indicating first one colossal leg, then another: "Look at 'er, ladies and gentlemen! Did ever yer see sich flesh, sich size, sich proporshun? And mind yer, it's all real genuine bony-fidy fat; no make-believes, shams, or saw-dust in this exhibition! Look 'ere!" and he prods her with his stick in her overflowing sides, and he pinches her fat neck and arms as though she were a prize ox or sheep. "Turn round!" he says, and she turns slowly as though on a pivot, and displays a back that is such a mountain of flesh as I have seen nowhere, save on the body of a prize pig. As she faces us again, a fat smile of pleased complacency dawns on her features at marking our amazement and admiration of her manifold beauties. At her knee, but overlooked in the neighbourhood of her mountainous presence, stands a tiny dwarf, who nearly dislocates his neck in peeping up at her. It is plain that he admires her beyond all earthly things, and that she is to him, not only the lode-star of his existence, but the type of everything that is comely and pleasant to the eye in woman. Decidedly impressed, we take our departure, and repair to seek our fairings in the smartly laid-out stalls in the shadow of the old grey market-house. We buy mother a thimble, not that we are aware she is in want of one, but a silver thimble is a nice, useful, comfortable sort of thing, that is sure to come in handy if you wait long enough, and we have no notion,
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