CHAMMY AND  CHAMMIETTA.

Lacerta was their family name, Chammy and Chammietta their own. They were husband and wife, and the sole survivors of a party of six South African captive chameleons, who " took ship" for England some time in the month of September, 1874, all of whom succumbed to the effects of the voyage and the miseries of imprisonment in a small iron-barred cage, excepting one little pair, the hero and heroine of the tale I am about to tell.

Belonging as they did, to one of the oldest, although by no means the most dignified family in the world, a very special interest attached to all their ways and doiDgs. Insignificant little saurians as they were of some eight-and-a-half inches long, they belonged to a race which in long-gone-by ages, had peopled the world with monsters; and even in these degenerate days they had relations in South America who could swallow a sheep, cousins in the Nile who could swallow a man, while the bones of the dead dragons in all the museums of Europe show how great the family once had been.

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