Page:The Strand Magazine (Volume 4).djvu/518



A TIGER is not a lion. This will be understood, though I treat of tigers in a leonine chapter. For neither is a leopard a lion nor a cheetah, nor a puma, yet all these live in the lion-house. Wherefore must the title be held to refer to the locality, and not to a section of its inhabitants. This is probably called the lion-house in a formal survival of the spirit which gives the lion a kingship among the lower animals. But the lion really is a fraud—as much so, at any rate, as the camel. It is very sad to find so many downright frauds among the innocent lower animals, but there isn't a department in these Gardens where you shall not discover a humbug of some sort. In this house, perhaps, there is less humbug about the tigers than about any of the others, although even the tiger has his little hypocrisies; still he is justly and honestly indignant that the place, by title, should be given to the lions, and is supercilious in his bearing to human creatures in consequence.