ve got his goat. He's
afraid of me. All that's required is time, and time adds to value with
an animal like him."

Not on that first day, nor on the second, nor on the third, did the
requisite something really break inside Ben Bolt. But at the end of a
fortnight it did break. For the day came when Mulcachy rapped the chair
with his whip-butt, when the attendant through the bars jabbed the iron
fork into Ben Bolt's ribs, and when Ben Bolt, anything but royal,
slinking like a beaten alley-cat, in pitiable terror, crawled over to the
chair and sat down in it like a man. He now was an "educated" tiger. The
sight of him, so sitting, tragically travestying man, has been
considered, and is considered, "educative" by multitudinous audiences.

The second case, that of St. Elias, was a harder one, and it was marked
down against Mulcachy as one of his rare failures, though all admitted
that it was an unavoidable failure. St. Elias was a huge monster of an
Alaskan bear, who was good-natured and even facetious and humorous after
the way of bears. But he had a will of his own that was correspondingly
as stubborn as his bulk. He could be persuaded to do things, but he
would not tolerate being compelled to do things. And in the
trained-animal world, where turns must go off like clockwork, is little
or no space for persuasion. An animal must do its turn, and do it
promptly. Audiences will not brook the delay of waiting while a trainer
tries to persuade a crusty or roguish beast to do what the audience has
paid to see it do.

So St. Elias received his first lesson in compulsion. It was also his
last lesson, and it never progressed so far as the training-arena, for it
took place in his own cage.

Noosed in the customary way, his four legs dragged through the bars, and
his head, by means of a "choke" collar, drawn against the bars, he was
first of all manicured. Each one of his great claws was cut off flush
with his flesh. The men outside did this. Then Mulcachy, on the inside,
punched his nose. Not lightly as it sounds was this operation. The
punch was a perforation. Thrusting the instrument into the huge bear's
nostril, Mulcachy cut a clean round chunk of living meat out of one side
of it. Mulcachy knew the bear business. At all times, to make an
untrained bear obey, one must be fast to some sensitive portion of the
bear. The ears, the nose, and the eyes are the accessible sensitive
parts, and, the eyes being ou