might command its price as an advertisement for the soap. There are other respects in which the lion compares unfavourably with the tiger. Watch them yawning. Yawning, by-the-bye, is the only really fashionable amusement here in the lion-house—after eating. One of the cheetahs has a wooden ball to play with, but a cheetah is naturally low in his tastes, and even he is ashamed of the amusement, pursuing it by stealth, when unobserved, and concealing the ball by lying before it when visitors arrive; and in his inner heart I feel sure he prefers eating—if not yawning.
I have before now felt suspicious of the genuine character of some of the yawns here to be inspected. There are really too many of them. It is largely a mere posing and show-off. "Law, Maria," says the country cousin, "look at him agapin'; what awful teeth!" and the lion (or tiger as may be) likes it, seizing the first opportunity of gaping again, and extracting more flattery. So that yawning has become a fashionable pursuit.
But there is an inferiority in the lion's yawn. The tiger opens his head frankly and fully, baring his gums and exposing his teeth in all their vicious pointedness. It is a fierce yawn, a downright yawn, such a yawn as could be no yawn but a tiger's. The lion's might almost be a sheep's. His heavy lips overhang his gums like those of a toothless old woman. It is a mere slovenly, ridiculous yawn, with no terror in it. The lips retract a little perhaps as the mouth closes, but all the lustre is already gone from out of that yawm.
Dressing the part.
Anybody who looks at the matter with the least care may see that in all things the lion has been accorded an elevation which is not his right. The superstition is long a-dying, even among the lower animals themselves. The puma here, for instance, puffed up that with a ridiculous vanity born of having been called the American lion by some naturalist who should have known better, rolls among his bed-straw until enough hangs
