who is treated thus in caravans. The lion, as I have said, is a fraud; a posing, theatrical, Turveydrop and Bobadil of a fraud. Look at him in this, his house. He turns up his nose at the visitors and affects a magnanimous superiority. If he were a human thing he would wear pince-nez and a velvet jacket, and look pityingly great at picture shows, though in his inner heart a mere beer-drinking vulgarian and a smoker of pipes. So always with the lion; he will pose fine and large if he meet you out for a walk in a jungle, and do his utmost to terrify you; if driven to it he may take the liberty of helping himself to a mouthful of you. But all this is only if he has first failed to sneak away unobserved. In South Africa a team-driver, finding a family of lions in his path, will calmly take his long stock-whip and whip them away; and they go meekly, glad to escape the lash. When no stock-whip is handy, a traveller from England is used—preferably with a title.
A superior person.
A beer-drinking vulgarian.
Here in one respect only are the lions treated with absolute cruelty, but in that respect the cruelty is of an aggravated sort. Come into the lion-house at what time, on what day (except Saturday and Sunday) you please, and you shall find various artists, and more various people who are not, nor ever will be artists, sketching and daubing and outraging the features and the feelings of lions and tigers. Perhaps, however, it is a moral dispensation, teaching the animals to look forward to Sunday with longing, as a day of blessed relief and rest; guarding their conduct in the matter of Sunday observance, while the bars and the keeper take care of it in other matters.
For cartage.
Little defence is available against all these daubers; but it is possible for a lion or a tiger to lie lifelessly and flat upon its side, offering only the uninspiriting outline of a
