"A lapdog! What, a dear little King Charles's spaniel?"

No, but a little terrier, which the Lioness in a natural state of health would have devoured on his first introduction, whereas being troubled with the vapours, she could not dispense with a plaything that happened to amuse her.

"A Lioness with the vapours and a lapdog-ridiculous!" Madam I am in earnest, severely serious. But just do me the honour to step with me, in fancy, to the Zoological Gardens. Therelook at that Lioness. How indolently she stretches herself-how listlessly she rolls her head and half closes her languid eyes! Then what distressing yawns, as if for a change she would turn herself inside out! "Rather like ennui, I confess."

No doubt of it. Now look at yonder moping Lion, too apathetic even to glance at us. Look at his head between his knees, and his tail, that formidable tail, furnished at the end, as naturalists tell us, with a kind of prickle, so that he can spur as well as lash himself into a hasty fit, lying as idle and still as a torpid snake. Did you ever see an attitude more expressive of lassitude, and yet he hath but taken a few turns round his den, and given one roar since sunrise. All he cares is to blink, and gape, and doze, through the long hours till suppertime. Yonder again is a female Puma, with head drooping and closed eyes, uttering at intervals an inward groan, as palpable a sufferer from world-weariness as Mariana at the Moated Grange. The panthers, leopards, ounces, jaguars, and the smaller cats, from constitutional irritability, are somewhat more active, or rather restless; but it is only another mode of expressing the same thing. One and all are labouring under tedium vitæ so intensely that it is a wonder they have never discovered self-murder ! In fact Chuny, the elephant who was shot for attempting to break out of his prison, is said, after receiving many musket-balls, to have knelt down at the command of his keeper, and to have presented his head with suicidal docility to the marksmen.

"Their lives, poor things, must indeed be very monotonous !"

Miserably so, madam, and their hours like ages! No amusement, no employment to shorten them! One can fancy Time himself looking in at the Beasts through the iron lattices, and tauntingly whispering, "Ah, ah! with all your murderous, paws, and claws, and jaws, you cannot kill ME!"

"One may, indeed; but now, if you please, sir, we will go. My own spirits begin to flag, and a sort of lassitude comes over me. I presume from example and the influence of the place."

Beyond question, madam. There was a case in point. My friend H., the well-known artist, once had occasion to take the portrait of a Lion in the Tower Menagerie; but he went so frequently, and required such long sittings, that, knowing the usual facility of his pencil,' I became curious to learn the cause.

"Why, the truth is," said H., "if I could only have kept my spirits up and my eyes open, the thing would have been done in a tithe of the time; but what with the dejection and drowsiness of the beasts, and their continual gaping, I was so infected with their dulness that after the first ten minutes I invariably began to blink and yawn too, and soon fell asleep.

"HUZZA!"

My dear sir

"Huzza! huzza!"

My dear sirs

"Huzza! huzza! huzza!"

CHAP. IV.

Gentlemen-Ladies-Boys-Girls-good people-do allow me to

ask the reason of such vociferous cheering?

"The Baron for ever!"

ᎬᏂ ?

"The thing with a hard name for ever!"

What Baron ?-what Doctor ?-what thing with a hard name? "What thing? Why, Som-nam-bam-boozle-fusilism, to be sure. The animal sent the painter to sleep, didn't he?"

Yes.

"And ain't that Animal Magnetism?";

Yes, yes-certainly, yes-as clear a case of Mesmerism as ever I met with!

CHAP. V.

On the morning of the first of May, 1822, between nine and ten o'clock, I entered the menagerie of Exeter Change, and walked directly as usual, into the great room appropriated to the larger animals. There was no person visible, keeper or visiter, about the place-like Alexander Selkirk, "I was Lord of the Fowl and the Brute." I had the lions all

to myself. As I stepped through the door my eyes mechanically turned towards the den of my old enemy, the royal Bengal tiger, fully expecting to receive from him the customary salutes of a spiteful grin and a growl. But the husky voice was silent, the grim face was nowhere to be seen. The cage was empty!

My feeling on the discovery was a mixed one of relief and disappointment. Methought I breathed more freely from the removal of that vague apprehension which had always clung to me, like a presentimenof injury sooner or later from the savage beast. A few minutes, nevertheless, spent in walking about the room, convinced me that his depart ture had left a void never properly to be filled up. Another royal tiger, larger even, and as ferocious, might take his place-but it was unlikely that the new tenant would ever select me for that marked and personal animosity which had almost led me at times to believe that we inherited some ancient feud from our respective progenitors. An enemy as well as a friend of old standing, though not lamented, must be missed. It must be a loss, if not to affection, to memory and association, to be deprived of even the ill-will, the frown, or sneer of an old familiar face, and the brute was, at any rate, a good hater." There was something piquant if not flattering, in being selected for his exclusive malignity. But he was gone, and the menagerie had henceforward lost, for me, a portion of its interest. But stop there is a gentle reader in an ungentle hurry to expostulate.

"What! sorry for a nasty, vicious, wild beast, as owed you a grudge for nothing at all, and only wanted an opportunity to spit his spite ?"

Nay, I

Exactly so, madam. The case is far from uncommon. once knew a foreign gentleman in a very similar predicament. From his German reading, helped by an appropriate style of feeding, the stomach of his imagination had become so stuffed and overloaded with Zamiels, Brocken Witches, Hobgoblins, Vampires, Were Wolves, Incubi, and other devilries, that for years he never passed a night without what we call bad dreams. Well, I had not seen him for some months, when at last he called upon me, looking so wobegone and out of spirits, as to make me inquire rather anxiously about his health. He shook his head dejectedly, sighed deeply, laid his hand on his chest, as if about to complain of it, and in a broken voice and broken English, informed me of his case.

"O, my goot fellow, I am miserable quite. Dere is someting all wrong in me-someting very bad-I have not had de Night-Mare for tree weeks."

“Well, after that, sir, I can swallow the tiger. So pray go on."

After the first surprise was over my curiosity became excited, and began to speculate on the causes of the creature's absence. Was he dead? Had he been destroyed for his ferocity, or parted with to make room for a milder specimen of the species? Had he gone to perform in the legitimate drama-or taken French leave? I was looking round for somebody to answer these queries, when all at once I descried an object that made me feel like a man suddenly blasted with a thunderbolt.

"Mercy on us! You don't mean to say that it was the tiger?"

I do. Huddled up in a dark corner of the room he had been overlooked by me on my entrance, and cunningly suppressing his usual snarl of recognition, the treacherous beast had proceeded to intercept my retreat. At my first glimpse of him he was skulking along, close to the wall, in the direction of the door. Had I possessed the full power of motion, he must have arrived there first-but terror rivetted me to the spot. There I stood, all my faculties frozen up, dizzy, moBut tionless and dumb. Could I have cried out, my last breath of life would certainly have escaped from me in one long, shrill scream. it was pent up in my bosom, where my heart, after one mighty bound upwards, was fluttering like a scared bird. There was a feeling of My deadly choking at my throat, of mortal sickness at my stomach. tongue in an instant had become stiff and parched-my jaw lockedmy eyes fixed in their sockets, and from the rush of blood seemed looking through a reddish mist, whilst within my head a whizzing noise struck up that rendered me utterly incapable of thought or comprehension. Such, as far as I can recollect, was my condition, and which, from the symptoms, I should say, was very similar to a combined attack of apoplexy and paralysis.

This state, however, did not last. At first, every limb and joint had suddenly stiffened, rigid as cast iron; my very flesh, with the blood in its veins, had congealed into marble: but after a few seconds, he muscles as abruptly relaxed, the joints gave way, the blood thawed and seemed escaping from the vessels, the substance of my body

seemed losing its solidity, and with an inexpressible sense of its imbecility, I felt as if my whole frame would fall in a shapeless mass on the floor.

"Gracious goodness-how dreadful!"

The tiger, in the interim, having gained the door, had crouched down -cat-like-his back curved inwards, his face between his fore-paws, and with his glaring eyeballs steadily fixed on mine, was creeping on his belly by half-inches towards me, his tail meanwhile working from side to side behind him, and as it were sculling him on.

In another moment this movement ceased, the tail straightened itself out, except the tip, which turned up, and became nervously agitated, a warning as certain as the like signal from an enraged rattlesnake.

There was no time to be lost. A providential inspiration, a direct whisper, as it were, from heaven, reminded me of the empty cage, and suggested, with lightning rapidity, that the same massive bars which had formerly kept the Man Eater within, might now keep him out. In another instant I was within the den, had pulled to the door, and shot the heavy bolt. The Tiger foiled by the suddenness of this unexpected manœuvre, immediately rose from his couchant position, and after violently lashing each [flank with his tail, gave vent to his dissatisfaction in a prolonged inward grumble, that sounded like distant thunder. But he did not long deliberate on his course: to my infinite horror, I saw him approach the den, where rearing on his hind legs, in the attitude the heralds call rampant, he gave a tremendous roar, which made my blood curdle, and then resting his fore-paws on the front of the cage, with his huge, hideous face pressed against the bars, he stared at me a long, long, long stare, with two red fiery eyes, that alternately gloomed and sparkled like burning coals.

"And didn't the Tiger, sir, poke his great claws, sir, into the cage, sir, and pick you out, sir, bit by bit, sir, between the bar ?"

Patience, my dear little fellow, patience. Since the Creation, perhaps, a Man and a Wild Beast, literally changing places, were never before placed in such an anomalous position: and in these days of dulness, and a dearth of dramatic novelties, having furnished so very original and striking a situation, the Reader ought to be allowed a little time to enjoy it.

HA! ha! ha!

CHAP. VI.

"Zounds!-pshaw !-phoo!-pish!" ejaculates a Courteous Reader, "it's all a hoax, the author is laughing at us."

Not at all. The cachinnatory syllables were intended to signify the peal of dreary laughter with which the hyena hailed my incarceration. It was perhaps only a coincidence-and yet the beast might comprehend and enjoy the sudden turning of the tables, the Man became a Prisoner, and the Brute his Gaoler.

It might tickle his savage fancy to behold a creature of the species before which the animals of his own instinctively quailed and skulked off-it might gratify a splenetic hatred, born of fear, to see a member of that aristocratic order reduced by a Revolution, beyond the French one, into a doomed captive in such a Bastile!

"Excuse me, sir, but do you really believe that a brute beast ever reasons so curiously?"

It is difficult to say, madam, for they never utter, much less publish, their speculations. That some do reason and even moralize—

"Moralize! what, a brute beast-for instance, a great bear-a moralist like Dr. Johnson ?"

Yes, madam ;-or Hervey, of the Meditations. The hyena is notoriously a frequenter of graves-a prowler amongst the Tombs. He is, also, the only beast that laughs-at least above his breath. And putting these two circumstances together, who knows but that the Ghoul acquired his Sardonic grin, and his cynical ha! ha! ha! from a too intimate acquaintance with the dusty, mouldy, rubbishing, unsavoury relics of the pride, power, pomps and vanities of the so-called Lord of the Creation?

"Who indeed, sir? What man can see into the heart of a brute beast?"

Why, if any one, ma'am, it's the man who puts his head into the lion's mouth.

CHAP. VII.

Ir was now my turn to know and understand how Time "travels in divers paces with divers persons." To feel how the precious stuff that life is made of might be drawn out, like fine gold, into inconceivable lengths. To learn the extreme duration of minims and seconds, and possible "last moments" of existence-the practicability of living ages, as in dreams, between one vital pulsation and another!

Oh those interminable and invaluable intervals between breath and breath!

How shall I describe-by what gigantic scale can I give a notion of the enormous expansion of the ordinary fractions of time, when marked on a Dial of the World's circumference by the Shadow of death?

Methinks while that horrible face, and those red, fiery eyes were gazing at me, Pyramids might have been built-Babylons foundedEmpires established-Royal Dynasties have risen, ruled, and fallenyea, even that other Planets might have fulfilled their appointed cycles from Creation to Destruction, during those nominal minutes which by their immense span seemed actually to be preparing me for Eternity.

CHAP. VIII.

In the mean time the tiger kept his old position in front of the cage, without making any attempt to get at me. He could have no fear of my getting out to eat him, and as to his devouring me, having recently breakfasted on shin of beef he seemed in no hurry for a second meal, knowing perfectly well, that whenever he might feel inclined to lunch, he had me ready for it, as it were, in his safe.

Thus the beast continued with intolerable perseverance to stare in upon me, who, crouched up at the further corner of the den, had only to await his pleasure or displeasure. Once or twice, indeed, I tried to call out for help, but the sound died in my throat, and when at length