ADVENTURES OF AN OPERA-GLASS. 119 



Strange sights lias iliat large, old, battered 

 opera-glass seen in its day, for, besides its legi- 

 timate occupation of gazing at the beauties in 

 the opera-houses of London, Paris, Florence, 

 Naples, Havana, and New York, it has seen 

 great races at Epsom ; great reviews in the 

 Champ-de-Mars ; great bull-fights in the am- 

 phitheatre at Seville. It has stalked red- deer 

 on the hills of the highlands, scaly crocodiles 

 on the sandbanks of the Nile, and read the 

 hieroglyphics on the tops of the awful temples 

 and monuments of Thebes and Karnak. It 

 has peered through the loopholes of the ad- 

 vanced trenches at the frowning, dust-coloured 

 batteries of the Eedan and the Malakoff. It has 

 gazed over the splendid cane-fields of the West 

 Indies, from the tops of the forest clad moun- 

 tain-peaks of Trinidad and Martinique ; over 

 the Falls of Niagara ; over the Bay of Naples 

 from the top of Vesuvius ; over Cairo from the 

 tops of the pyramids ; over the holy city of 

 Jerusalem from the top of Mount Calvary; 

 and now it was occupied in quietly scanning 

 the colossal proportions of a polar bear, amid 

 the icebergs of the frozen north. 



The bear wallvcd slowly and deliberately for 

 some 200 or 300 yards on the ice, as if un- 



I 4 



