ear. Most languages seem native to him.
Music he delights in, nor is his skill in
performing contemptible. Literature is at once
the necessary and the luxury of his life. Art
he lives for, Solitude is the atmosphere he
breathes. There are few more interesting spots
in my memory than the old tower (herein faithfully
drawn) in the old lace-making town in fair
old Flanders.

OUR EYE-WITNESS AND A
SALAMANDER.

As he pays his money at the gate of the
London Zoological Gardens, the visitor who
has retained that freshness which is one of the
greatest of earthly blessings, is irresistibly taken
back to his old childish days. The click of the
turnstile that admits him, seems to have snipped
a score of years off his life, and, already sniffing
from afar that faint musty odour of exaggerated
mousiness which pervades the place, he feels
that he is returning to the days of lessons and
holidays, of a coercion whose strongest restrictions
were liberty itself to the restraints of
later life, and that he has entered a region of
wonder and delight, of lions, tigers, bears—and
buns. Have we not, all, some cherished
memory of L for lion in the spelling-book,
illustrated by a small woodcut of an animal with a
human profile like that on a George the Third
shilling? The single huge dab of yellow, which
covered much more of the spelling-book than it
did of the lion, was executed, if the reader
remembers, with a fine hand, and gives one the
idea that five thousand spelling-books were
ranged in order before the artist, open at L,
that five thousand yellow dabs were all done
in a twinkling while the brush was wet, and
that then the green brush was similarly called
into play, to decorate that bush which is the
only object that breaks the sandy desert on
which the king of beasts is standing. Have we
forgotten, either, T for tiger, or W for the wolf
that killed Red Riding-Hood?

Let us own, now we are grown up, that we are
all unanimous on one subject—that we are all
agreed that T for tiger should never sit down.
He may lie down in any attitude he likes, he will
never do so in an ugly one. He may sprawl
about to his heart's content. He may stand, walk,
or raise himself on his hind-legs, as much as he
chooses; but when he sits down, he looks like an
ass, and the spectator loses all respect for him. It
is probable that T for tiger has never been
represented by a nobler specimen than the larger
of the two now exhibited in the gardens of the
Zoological Society, but when your Eye-witness
saw him sitting down on his bed like a cat, and
yawning, he felt that the magnificence of the
beast was not proof against the effect of such
behaviour, and that T for tiger was forgetting
himself. Your servant would seriously advise
the noble Society of Zoology to have a word
with this member of their company, who is really
making himself too cheap. Not only does he
insist on sitting down and looking cheerfully,
and with levity, about him, as a cat will look
after summer flies, but your servant would
also call the attention of the society to the
fact that this animal is in the habit of
performing, on the near approach of his dinner-
hour, a maniac dance, jumping over his
companion's back, and his companion over him, in a
frantic sidelong leap-frog of anticipation,
executed with incredible rapidity for a quarter of
an hour before the victuals reach him. T for
Tiger is losing himself by this conduct, and unless
he takes this word of advice from a friend, will
gradually fall into contempt.

It is a wretched life for that Nubian lion
who is always looking off into that little bit of
distance which is open to him at the end of the
terrace; it is a wretched life for him, and indeed
for all these beasts, to have nothing to look
forward to but their meat all the day long. No
adventure, no change of scene, no soft sand, no
shady trees. There is a whole bookful of
testimony to the ennui of such a life in that wild
look “off” of the lion as he stands erect in his
strength. The same exploring glance into the
furthest distance within range is observable, too,
in his neighbour the tiger, who, that he may get
a yet greater extent of the Regent's Park within
view, will raise himself to an enormous height
on his hind-legs, propping himself with his fore-
legs against the bars of his cage, and seeming
to stretch almost over one's head in a great arch
of animal beauty.

It is only in the noblest animals that this
straining of the eyes into the distance is noticeable.
You will not see it in the bear, or the
wolf, or the hyæna, and one feels, therefore, the
less for their captivity. These baser brutes
either stupidly assent to their imprisonment,
objecting to it with but a sullen resistance, as
is the case with the bears, or fret and fuss under
it without dignity, as the vile hyæna or the
meanly trotting wolf. But the lion looks out
into such distance as is within his ken, as the
great feline group, and one other race to be
presently noted, alone can look. Indeed, it is no
poetical fiction, no concession to conventionality,
to call this creature the King of Beasts. His
dignity is too great to allow him to complain of
that which he cannot help. He does not quarrel
with his bars, but his life is one long protest
against them. You have outwitted him, you
have, by superior numbers and by cunning,
entrapped and caught him, but he has lost nothing
of his royalty by it. Lying down in weariness
—but not fatigue—pacing backwards and
forwards, or, as has just been said, standing erect
and gazing out over the world of London, he is
still the same, and seems to say, like one who
protested also against captivity of a different
sort, “Come, come; I AM A KING, my masters,
know you that?”

There is another state prisoner in this place,
who has never yet made the best of his captivity,
and who never will. It is the golden eagle. That
straining of the gaze into the distance, is to be
observed in this royal captive, almost in a more
distinguishing degree than in the lion. See this