The Children's Book of London Part 10

Having looked long at the Traitor's Gate, we can pa.s.s on into the Tower and see what else is there.

The prisoners went sometimes from the Traitor's Gate to the b.l.o.o.d.y Tower, so called from the fact that it was in a room here Edward V. and his brother were murdered by the order of their wicked uncle. The boys'

bones were afterwards found at the foot of a staircase in the White Tower. The b.l.o.o.d.y Tower was not always called this awful name; it used to be known at first as the Garden Tower. In the b.l.o.o.d.y Tower the Duke of Northumberland, who tried to make Lady Jane Grey a queen, was imprisoned before he was beheaded. He must have known he well deserved his fate; but if he had any conscience he must often have felt very miserable to think of Lady Jane and her young husband, his own son, who would be likely to suffer for his fault too.

Very soon the dark walls beheld another prisoner, Archbishop Cranmer, a martyr in Queen Mary's reign. Cranmer was not a strong man by nature, and the long wearing imprisonment tried him so much that at last he gave in to his enemies, and said he would renounce his faith. He thought then he would be released; but no, he heard that he was to be burned all the same. We can imagine the horror of the poor prisoner, who had denied his religion and yet not saved his life. He realized then how weak he had been, and, like St. Peter, no doubt he wept bitterly. However, when the day came, and he was taken to Oxford to be burnt, he had recovered all his strength of mind. He declared himself firmly a Protestant, and when the f.a.ggots were stacked up round him and the fire lit, he held one arm, his right arm, into the flames, saying it should burn first, as it had signed his denial. He held it there until it was all burned away, and died the death of a brave martyr.

Another well-known man was imprisoned in the b.l.o.o.d.y Tower after Cranmer.

This was Sir Walter Raleigh, who, as a handsome, gay young man, had attracted great favour from Queen Elizabeth. It is said that one day when she was going to cross a puddle Raleigh sprang forward and flung a beautiful cloak he was wearing over the mud as a carpet for her feet.

The cloak was very rich and handsome, as were the cloaks the n.o.bles wore then. Of course it was spoilt, and Elizabeth was much flattered by the courtesy of the young man. She made him a knight, and he was raised to great honour. He sailed across the seas and discovered new lands, and he brought back tobacco and introduced smoking into England. When the Spaniards attacked England, the gay and gallant Sir Walter fought valiantly, and came back covered with honour and glory. No man could have had a brighter life, no man could have risen higher. And then came his downfall. He was accused of plotting against King James, who had succeeded Queen Elizabeth. He was condemned to death and sent to the Tower. There seems to be no reason to believe that Raleigh was guilty, but, guilty or innocent, he spent fourteen years in the Tower. He was not the kind of man to sit idle, so he set to work and wrote a book on the history of the world, which kept him occupied, and showed that he was clever as well as gay and daring. Then once more he was let out for a short time while he sailed to the West to discover a gold-mine of which someone had told him. King James, who always wanted money, had let him go on giving his promise he would come back. Raleigh did not find the gold-mine, but he was a man of his word. He came back, though he knew the terrible prison and perhaps the block and axe were waiting for him. He was beheaded in Whitehall, where King James's own son was so soon after to be beheaded too. Raleigh's long imprisonment must have been dreadful to a man full of life and energy. Yet he had compensations: he was allowed to walk in the garden, and his history must always have been a solace to him.

There were many others imprisoned in the b.l.o.o.d.y Tower; but we must pa.s.s on.

In walking from one part of the Tower to another we meet some men dressed very curiously in red dresses with velvet caps. These are the Beef-eaters, who guard the Tower, also called the Yeomen of the Guard.

Their odd name and odd dress always attract people, and they are such fine men that children sometimes wonder if they are called Beef-eaters because they eat a lot of beef! That is not so. The name is said to come from an old French word _buffetier_, which means a man who waited at a buffet or sideboard; and in old times the beef-eaters waited on the King and Queen, and they still wear the same costume they wore three hundred years ago. Every night before midnight the chief Beef-eater goes to find the chief warder; the Beef-eater carries the keys of the Tower, and with a guard of men the two go together to lock up the outer gate. When the sentinel who keeps watch hears them, he calls out, 'Who goes there?' and the answer is, 'The Keys!' Then says the sentinel, 'Advance, King George's Keys!' This is a curious old custom. Close by the b.l.o.o.d.y Tower is the Jewel House, where the crowns of the King and Queen and other royalties are kept. They are made of gold and set with precious stones, so big that it is difficult to believe that they are real--great rubies and pearls as large as pigeon's eggs, and huge glittering diamonds. In this room there is a man always on watch, day and night. Yet the jewels were once stolen by a daring man called Colonel Blood, who managed to get away from the Tower, but was caught soon after with the King's crown under his cloak. This was in the reign of Charles II.

In the White Tower are rooms full of armour worn by English soldiers--armour of all the different ages, from the time when a man wore so much iron that if he fell down he could not get up again, and sometimes was actually smothered before he could get out of it, up to the present day.

In the White Tower there is one very awful dungeon, a little narrow cell, without a ray of light, no window at all--nothing but dense blackness. There must have been many prisoners kept here, for on the walls there are sad cuttings, now half worn away, which tell how the poor men occupied their time in chipping their names in the stone. Many of the martyrs of Queen Mary's reign must have felt this terrible blackness, for there are texts of which the dates show that they were cut at that time. One of these is, 'Be faithful unto death, and I will give thee a crown of life.' The hand that traced out these letters long years ago is still. The martyr has long since pa.s.sed from the darkness of the narrow cell to the great brightness of eternal light.

The torture instruments are shown in the White Tower too, and many of these brave martyrs felt the torture before they reached the light. The rack was very commonly used. On it men--yes, and women too--were sometimes stretched as on a bed; their wrists were tied with cords above their heads, and their ankles with cords to the other end of the rack.

Then a man turned a handle, and the hands and feet were slowly drawn in opposite directions. The poor wretch might shriek and scream, or he might turn as white as death and let never a sound escape him; but it was all the same: the rack moved on. There was a doctor there to feel the victim's heart and say when he could bear no more without dying. And then, when that happened, perhaps he fainted with the agony and was released, and carried away to be allowed to recover a little, only to be brought back another day. Sometimes he would bear it bravely enough the first time, but at the second time his courage would give way, and he would cry out and say he would do whatever it was his persecutors wanted, perhaps change his religion, perhaps reveal the names of his companions in a plot. There were other tortures, too--a kind of iron cage, called the Scavenger's Daughter, with a collar of iron to fasten round a man's neck and irons round his arms and legs, which cramped him up in an awful position, in which he was left for hours, until every bone ached as if it were red-hot. The thumbscrew was a little thing, but caused great agony. It was fixed on to anyone's thumb, and then made tighter and tighter, until sometimes the wretched victim fainted away.

Another way that people were tortured was by being hung up by their thumbs, so that the whole weight of their bodies rested on the cords. In this position they were left for hours together.

There is a very beautiful chapel in the White Tower which we must certainly see. Outside in the garden, opposite to another chapel, called St. Peter ad Vincula, is the execution ground, where so many people were beheaded. But I think this is enough for one chapter, and we will learn something more about the Tower in the next.

CHAPTER XIX

THE TOWER OF LONDON--_continued_

Nearly all the people condemned to be beheaded at the Tower were executed on Tower Hill, which lies outside the walls; only a few who were of royal birth or especially favoured were beheaded inside the walls, where they could not be seen by the great mult.i.tude. And the plot of ground outside the chapel is the place where these favoured few were killed. We can stand now on the spot where gentle Lady Jane Grey laid her little head on the block. She was not the first near the throne to have been executed here. Two of the Queens of the bloodthirsty Henry VIII. had died at the same place--Anne Boleyn and Katherine Howard. Both these Queens had been received here by Henry in great state before their marriages, and little had they thought when they arrived and were greeted with guns firing and flags flying that very soon the bell would be tolling for their death. It is difficult to believe in the cold-heartedness of a man like Henry. Anne Boleyn was a bright, gay little woman; she was the mother of Queen Elizabeth, and she had done nothing whatever to merit death. But Henry had seen someone else he wanted to marry, so he ordered his wife to be beheaded. It is said that he waited under a great tree on a height in Richmond Park, some miles away, to see a rocket fired up from the Tower, which was to announce the death of Anne, and to let him know he could marry Jane Seymour. Anne had only been his wife three years when he tired of her, and she was twenty-nine when she was executed. Four years later the King married Katherine Howard, having had two wives--Jane Seymour and Anne of Cleves--in between. Poor Katherine was Queen only for two years, when she followed Anne to the block.

The handsome and gallant Earl of Ess.e.x, who had been a favourite of Queen Elizabeth's, also suffered here. He had lost the Queen's favour, and, after having been one of the princ.i.p.al men at the Court, was treated with coldness and disdain. Ess.e.x's proud temper could not endure this, and he made plots against the Queen, one of which was to kidnap her and carry her off as his prisoner. Elizabeth heard of this, and sent her soldiers to seize him. Ess.e.x had then a house in the Strand, near St. Clement's Church, and he barricaded his house and defied the Queen's soldiers. Nothing could have been more mad. Elizabeth was furious when she heard it. Cannon were placed on the tower of St. Clement's Church, and from there they were fired at the house of the reckless Earl, who was at last forced to submit. He was tried, found guilty of high treason, and condemned to death. But all the time Elizabeth, who must still have cared for the high-spirited Ess.e.x, felt sure that he would not really be killed; for long years before she had given him a ring, and told him that whenever he was in great need he had only to send that ring to her, and she would help him. So she expected to receive the ring from him, and was very slow in signing his death-warrant; but the ring never came, so she signed the warrant, and then she recalled it. Yet still there was no sign from Ess.e.x. Elizabeth began to grow uneasy, and thought perhaps that the Earl was too proud to ask help from her when he had defied her. Well, if that were so, she could do nothing to save him, for she was a queen, and was too proud to give help where it was not asked for; so she signed the death-warrant a second time. Meantime, Ess.e.x was in the Tower, and he had remembered the ring and the Queen's promise; he had been rebellious and he was very proud, but now that he was going to die in the full strength of his manhood it did not seem too hard a thing to do to ask a favour from Elizabeth, who had been so kind to him and was his Queen. After all, he had behaved very badly, and he knew it, and it was right to ask pardon. Perhaps this was what he thought, and he gave the ring to the Countess of Nottingham to take to the Queen. But the Countess of Nottingham did not want the Earl to live; she was jealous of his influence over Elizabeth, and she thought that if she kept back the token Ess.e.x would surely die.

So the time slipped away, and Elizabeth in her palace and Ess.e.x in his prison both thought bitterly of each other. The execution drew very near, and at last one day in February Ess.e.x was brought out to die.

Perhaps he thought up to the last minute that a messenger would ride up carrying a pardon from the Queen; but no, no one came, and at last he laid his head on the block, and perished thinking hard things of his Queen. Not long after the Countess of Nottingham herself fell ill, and on her deathbed confessed to Elizabeth the wicked thing she had done.

The knowledge that Ess.e.x had died believing her to have been faithless to her word so enraged the Queen that she said to the dying Countess: 'May G.o.d forgive you, for I never can!'

Many people spent most of their lives in the Tower. We have heard of Sir Walter Raleigh, who was here for fourteen years; but there were others imprisoned much longer. One man, a Duke of Orleans, afterwards King of France, was here for twenty-five years; and Lord Courtenay, son of the Earl of Exeter, who was of the Royal Family and descended from Edward IV., was kept in the Tower almost his whole life for fear that he might lay claim to the crown.

When the King or Queen of England used the Tower as a palace, the part they occupied was quite distinct from the prison. This part is now the Governor's house, and the Governor, who is called the Lieutenant of the Tower, lives in it. Here there are many splendid rooms, including a great council-room, where the King and his n.o.bles used to meet for consultation. Underneath the house is a room where Lord Nithsdale was imprisoned, and the story of his escape from the Tower is one of the most exciting in all history.

In the reign of George I. a n.o.bleman called the Earl of Nithsdale had joined in a plot to restore the Stuarts to the throne. You will remember that after the reign of James II. people said that Prince James was not his son at all, but a baby which had been adopted by the King, who had no son of his own; and as this was generally believed, after the King had been driven into exile, his daughters, the Princesses Mary and Anne, came to the throne and reigned one after the other. When they died the English crown was offered to a distant cousin, who was George I. But many English n.o.blemen and gentlemen said that this was unfair, and that the son of James II. and his son after him should have been King. We can never tell now which was right; but all this caused a great deal of unhappiness and much fighting. Those who took up the cause of the Stuarts were called Jacobites, and among this number was the Earl of Nithsdale. He was taken prisoner, and condemned by King George to die with several others, and he was sent to the Tower, there to wait his fate.

But he had a beautiful and determined wife, who was resolved to save his life. It was in the winter time, and, of course, there were then no trains to carry people swiftly and comfortably through the frosty air.

So she started on her journey from Scotland on horseback, and rode as far as Newcastle; but she was not a great horse-woman, and being wearied with her exertions, she there took a coach and proceeded to York, taking with her her faithful maid Evans. But when they got to York they found that so much snow had fallen that the coach could not go on to London at all. Now, all this time the days were pa.s.sing, and every day that pa.s.sed made Lord Nithsdale's execution nearer. His poor wife was in a terrible state of suspense; but she did not sit down and despair. She said that if there were no coach then must she ride to London. And so she did--rode about one hundred and eighty miles through all the snow, which was often up to her horse's girths, and at times she thought she would not be able to get through after all. But at last she did, and when she arrived in London her husband was still alive. Never thinking of herself or of her own weariness, Lady Nithsdale went to the Court, and used all the influence she possessed to get King George I. to pardon her husband.

But he was an obstinate, cruel little man, and he refused even to hear her, though she flung herself before him and caught at his coat.

Then she saw that there was nothing for it but to help her husband to escape out of that gloomy Tower. She therefore begged permission to go to see him. At first even this was refused her, but she gave the guards money, and at last they let her into the Tower. What a meeting that must have been, and how cheered the husband must have been to think of the strong love that had made his wife do so much for his sake!

But they had little time to talk about what was past, for they had to arrange for the future. Brave Lady Nithsdale formed a plan, but to carry it out it was necessary to get the help of two other women. She found one in a Mrs. Mills, in whose house she was lodging, and after some difficulty she found another, a friend of Mrs. Mills, called Mrs.

Morgan. Now, by this time it was the day before that fixed for Lord Nithsdale's execution, and everything depended on getting him out of the Tower at once. Lady Nithsdale told her companions of her plan, which was to make her husband walk out boldly through the guards dressed like a woman; and for this end she made Mrs. Morgan, who was a little fair, slim woman, wear two sets of clothes one over the other, and one set she meant that Lord Nithsdale should wear. Mrs. Mills was a big, stout woman, with fair eyebrows and fair hair, and Lady Nithsdale hoped that when her husband came through dressed in woman's clothes the guards would think he was Mrs. Mills. When they arrived at the Tower, the poor wife got out and asked to be allowed to take a friend in to say farewell to her husband, and she was told she might take one lady in at a time.

Accordingly, she and the thin Mrs. Morgan went in, and while they were in the cell where Lord Nithsdale was, Mrs. Morgan took off the extra clothes she had brought and left them for him to put on. Then she hurried back and told Mrs. Mills to come in. Lady Nithsdale ran to meet Mrs. Mills, who pretended to cry very much, and kept her handkerchief up to her face; and when she got into the cell they waited a little while and talked, for they hoped the gaolers, having seen some ladies pa.s.sing backwards and forwards, would now forget how many had gone into the cell. After a time Mrs. Mills went out again, and Lady Nithsdale kept calling after her to tell her that she wanted her maid, and that the maid must come quickly, and then she went back again to her husband. She had painted his dark eyebrows fair, and she had put rouge on his cheeks and dressed him up in her own petticoats and the clothes Mrs. Morgan had left; and she had told him not to stride like a man, but to take little mincing steps, so that the guards should not notice any difference. But there was one thing she could not hide, and that was his beard, and she had no time to cut it off; so she tucked it into his cloak in front, and told him to keep his head down and hold his handkerchief to his face and pretend to be crying bitterly. It was now getting dusky, and she was afraid that if they waited any longer the gaolers would bring candles and see what was being done. How the hearts of both husband and wife must have been beating when they opened the door and stepped forth into the anteroom where the guards were! Lady Nithsdale talked a good deal rather loudly, and said she could not understand why her maid had not come, and that she must come at once; and she begged her husband, whom she called 'Mrs. Betty,' to run down to her lodgings to see if the maid were there and send her to the prison.

And when they got to the outer door she let him go, and ran back to the cell herself. Then she talked again as if she were talking to her husband, so that the gaolers should hear, and made answers for him in a deep man's voice. Brave heart! she must have been well-nigh fainting with terror, and expecting to hear every minute a noise which would tell her she had been discovered. But after a time, when all seemed right, and when she could talk no more, she left the cell very slowly, and, shutting the door behind her, said to the gaolers that they need not take in lights until Lord Nithsdale asked for them, for he was praying, and did not wish to be disturbed. Then she went down to her coach.

And he really did get safely away; and the King was furious, and said Lady Nithsdale had given him more trouble than any woman in Europe. But Lady Nithsdale went and waited at a friend's house until she heard where her husband was in hiding in a little poor house, and then she joined him, and they stayed there together until things could be arranged for him to get over to France. A friend brought them a bottle of wine and some bread, and on this they lived from Thursday to Sat.u.r.day. But I do not expect they cared much what they ate, they must have been so happy to be together again.

It was very seldom indeed anyone had escaped from the Tower. Once a man tried to, and let himself down by a rope from his window; but the rope broke, and he fell headlong and was killed. The countess's plan was much better. Luckily, she and her husband had good friends, and one of them lent Lord Nithsdale the livery of his servant, and, pretending he was a footman, took him to Dover, where he got a boat and managed to cross over to France in safety. His estates were all taken from him, but that was a little thing when he had saved his life. His devoted wife joined him in Rome, and they lived abroad for the rest of their days.

Guy Fawkes, of whom we heard before, was examined in the King's house in the Tower, and the judges tried to make him give up the names of his companions; but villain as he was, Guy Fawkes was no coward, and he refused to turn traitor. Finding that he was obdurate, the judges decreed that he should suffer the torture of the rack, and accordingly he was racked again and again. At last in his agony he cried out that he would tell the history of the conspiracy, but not reveal the names of his fellow-conspirators. This was not enough. Once again he was brought to suffer the awful torture, and this time his gaolers told him that some of his comrades had been already taken, and were in the hands of the police. So Fawkes gave way and made a full confession, which was signed 'Guido Fawkes,' and is still kept. This was in November, and on the last day of the following January he and three of his a.s.sociates were executed at Westminster.

They were brought from the Tower to be executed, and Guy Fawkes was so weak and ill from the terrible tortures he had suffered that he could scarcely climb up the scaffold.

In other parts of the Tower numbers of men and women were imprisoned, but we might as well write a history of England as tell all their stories here. In one tower there is the word 'Jane,' cut in the wall by Lady Jane Grey's husband, the young Lord Dudley, and on many of the walls are names and records cut by sorrowful men and women almost without hope.

It is all changed now. No longer sobs and cries and executions are here, but only the voices of soldiers drilling or calling out to one another, the voices of little children at play on the wharf by the river, or of visitors who come to see the place. The soldiers are in barracks in the Tower, and they drill in the bottom of the deep moat, which is now quite dry.

If we pa.s.s from the Tower we shall find outside Tower Hill, where by far the greater number of executions took place. It is just a wide, open s.p.a.ce, paved like a street or market-place, and many people walk over it every day without giving a thought to all that has happened there in bygone times.

CHAPTER XX

THE ZOOLOGICAL GARDENS

If you go to the Zoological Gardens you ought to be a good walker and not easily tired. The animals are in cages, but they are not all close together; there are long stretches of green gra.s.s and trees and beautiful flower-beds between, and to go over the Zoo thoroughly takes a very long time. But it is not likely that any of you would want to know it thoroughly; the things you want most to look at are not the curious rare small animals or different sorts of birds, but the largest and best-known animals, such as the lions and tigers, the bears, elephants, and giraffes. Of all these the lions are the most interesting.

If we arrive at the Zoo a little before four o'clock in the afternoon we ought to go straight to the lion-house, for four o'clock is the lions'

dinner-time. The house is light and warm, and the cages are all down one side in a row. Behind them are the railed-in gardens belonging to the beasts; but sometimes the doors between are shut, and the lions are not allowed to walk in their gardens. On fine sunny days, however, we can see them there outside, licking their great lips and rolling about lazily on the warm ground. In the lion house about ten minutes to four all the great animals begin to get restless; they walk up and down and whine or howl, and as four o'clock draws near they get more and more excited, some of them going round and round in circles, always quicker and quicker. Though they have no watches, they know the time exactly, which is rather wonderful, for there is nothing to tell them four o'clock is near. This is their one meal in the day, so no wonder they look forward to it; and when you see what they get, it doesn't seem much for such a great big animal as a lion. Soon a rumbling sound is heard, and a little truck laden with raw meat runs up through a little pa.s.sage between the cages, and the keeper pushes it along the front of the cages to the end. Then the animals get frantic; the sight of the raw meat makes them savage; they leap and howl--great howls that would make your blood run cold if you heard them on a dark night when you were out in the forest. The animal that goes round in circles goes so fast he nearly tumbles on his head, and the others trot backwards and forwards, and all is noise and confusion. The keeper undoes a bar at the bottom of the cage, which leaves just enough room to put the meat in; then he picks out the piece he means for that animal and thrusts it through at the end of an iron rod. The lion or tiger pounces on it, and growling, carries it into a corner of its den. The keeper replaces the bar, and goes on to the next one, and so on until all are fed. Then a deep silence follows; there is only a licking of great lips, a sort of purring of content, and a sound of bones being crunched or sc.r.a.ped, and we can look at the animals more easily than when they are running about.

Here in front is a magnificent lion, with a great tawny mane; his broad nose is wrinkled as he crunches his bone. He has torn all the meat off it almost at once, and his rough tongue has licked it clean until it is quite polished; but he still goes on chewing it with those huge white teeth as long as your finger--teeth that would crunch through your arm in a moment. This old fellow is usually good-tempered for a lion, but when feeding-time comes his wife Mrs. Lioness has to go into the back den shut off by a little door to eat her dinner alone, or they would fight. Suddenly Mr. Lion raises his head and looks round grandly, as if he were ashamed of all those people who come to stare at him. He was a king in his own country, and now, alas! he is only a captive king.

Perhaps he sees a woman carrying a little baby in her arms, and he fixes his eyes on that baby until it is out of sight. What a delicious morsel it would make for dessert! But he knows he cannot get through his bars; he learnt that long ago when he was first brought here. He was not born in the Zoo--oh no; he had been caught when he was full grown. He remembers quite well the wild, free life, where, if he were not sure of a dinner every day, at least every now and then he got more than he could eat. While he licks his bone he is in a quiet mood, and if you listened very hard you might hear him talking.

'Yes,' he says (Lick, lick), 'that bone was very good, but there wasn't enough on it, and now I'm not going to get any more until to-morrow. Oh, those stupid humans, how they do stare! Have they never seen a gentleman eat his dinner before? They would open those silly round eyes a bit wider if these bars were not between us. I wish they could have seen me that day we caught the zebra. It was grand that!' (Lick, lick.) 'I had hunted all one night without getting even the whisk of a tail; and also during the day in the glaring, hot African sun, when I wanted to go to sleep; and I was very hungry. We, I and my wife, lay down in the shade a little while towards evening before we parted to see what we could pick up. There were the little ones to be considered, for when they had come running up and seen me with nothing, all their little tails dropped down, and you never saw such a set of little cats in your life. I told them I would bring them something next time for certain; and so I set off alone, as I said before, in the evening.

'The sun had burnt up all the gra.s.s, which was a kind of dusty brick-red colour; but that's not a bad thing for a lion, because he doesn't show against it. It was a very wide open plain where I was, with just a few shrubs and odd bits of tree for shelter. Well, I crouched down under one of these, trying to make myself as small as I could, and praying that the still air wouldn't send the smell of me over the plain to warn all those silly creatures I wanted to catch.

'Presently I smelt zebra. Now, good tender zebra makes a dish fit for a king, but the brute can trot at such a rate that I knew I shouldn't have a chance to catch him running. I must hide and leap out. The smell got stronger and stronger, and then I saw them half a mile off, a whole herd, galloping just as straight as they could come towards my hiding-place. I grew hot and cold then, I can tell you, and my tail quivered so I was afraid they would see it. I was in fine condition, and I reckoned that at the distance they would pa.s.s I could just by a very long spring land on the back of the leader. But then they might at any moment scent me, and I should be done for; up with their heels, and nothing more of supper should I see but a cloud of dust. So I waited, and they came right on. I shook with excitement. Then, just at the right moment, I gathered myself up, and with a great spring I cleared the distance and landed clean on the back of the leader. That was a surprise for him, I can tell you. He went down as if he had been shot, and the others, with snorts of terror, flew away like the wind. One stroke of my paw killed him, and then I stood up over his striped and quivering body and roared as loud as I could for my wife and little ones. They weren't far off, and they came as fast as they could; and to see those little beggars dancing about that zebra was a sight, almost as good a feeling it gave me as when I landed on that zebra's back. It had been a record jump that. We measured it afterwards in strides, and my wife said she was proud of me, and she always knew I could jump better than any other lion in South Africa.

'Well, those little beggars jumped on that zebra, and bit at him; but the skin was too tough for their little teeth, bless them! It was the funniest sight. But when the old woman and I started in, we did more than that, I can tell you; we tore off great chunks of him, and the little ones ate what they could. They got in the way, too, and we had to give them a slap now and then to keep them in order; and they snarled and swore at each other until their mother had to quiet them. When we had done we felt as if we could hardly walk, and we just wanted to get home as fast as we could and do no more that night. We had pretty well finished up that zebra before we walked off, and the vultures came hopping round to clean up what we had left. I was feeling all right then, and we lay down comfortable and satisfied. Oh dear! I had quite forgotten where I was; and now I wake up to find myself in this dull place, where there is no hunting and no fun, where we are caged up in horrid bars.'

Just as the lion finished speaking, Mrs. Lioness came out from the inner den. She was not nearly so handsome as her husband, and he thought her not nearly so handsome as his first wife, who had hunted with him in South Africa; still, she was company, and that was something.

We have stayed a long time at this lions' cage, and we must pa.s.s over all the rest of the lions--some of them born in captivity, who have never known the delight of a wild, free life--and go on to the great striped Bengal tiger, with his magnificent head and handsome face. There is not the same tremendous strength in his appearance as in the lion's, but there is something almost more terrible in his long, gliding body and catlike movements, more ferocious altogether. In the wild state the lion prefers to prey upon animals, and will not turn on man unless he is desperate. But a tiger sometimes takes to the life of a man-eater for no reason but because he likes the taste of human flesh; and once he has begun to eat human beings, he is a man-eater to the end of his days. He turns man-eater sometimes, too, when he is old and his strong teeth fail; and then he will hang about outside villages to pounce on a soft-flesh man, who is easier to catch than a wild animal.