Page:Under the Sun.djvu/36

14 lion-tamer, belonging to the establishment, and this man, with great courage, rushes straight into the cage and confronts the lion. Discipline and a loaded stick triumph over instinct. The lion releases its prey and the unfortunate keeper is at once dragged out.

Now it is easy enough, after such an incident as this, to talk of lions as savage brutes, and then to moralize over the foolhardiness of men who have grown accustomed to lions, and think that lions have therefore grown accustomed to them. But surely it is much more just to the animals to remember that it is the most natural thing in the world for a flesh-eating animal to spring at meat when it sees it within its reach.

The marvel, indeed, in these narratives always is the lion’s forbearance. In the end that staggering blow right between the eyes is accepted by him as a very forcible argument; but before the gallant lion-tamer comes to his friend’s rescue, at such a terrible risk to himself, the lion has always had plenty of time to do what he liked with the keeper he had caught, or at any rate to gobble up a good luncheon. When a lion is in a hurry it does not as a rule take him long to make a meal; but in the accidents that occur in menageries it does not seem to occur to the beast that there is any necessity for haste. Long captivity has made his practices unnatural. He has forgotten his old habits of hurried feeding. He had caught a man sure enough, for there the man was, and it was quite early in the morning. But he had all the day before him, so he thought; and, though he remarked that there was a great deal of unusual excitement on the other side of his bars, and that the human beings who were generally so leisurely seemed strangely flurried about something on this particular