f his sweet quest!
Let be the pallid silence that is rest--
And let all go!

WILLIAM WINTER.

STORY OF A LION.

When Smith's Circus and Menagerie Combination Company went to Utica
James Rounders was a lusty fellow of twenty, of some natural sagacity,
and no school education. An interest in wild beasts had been developing
in him for several years, and the odor of sawdust had become grateful to
his nostrils. It was, however, only one kind of wild beast with which he
was especially occupied. The quadruped of the noble aspect, stately
gait, and tremendous roar--the lion--was the animal of Rounders's
predilection and the object of his study.

He had gotten together some leading facts--so far as the stories of
lion-killers may be regarded as such--concerning his favorite animal. He
had heard how a lion had galloped off from the suburbs of the Cape of
Good Hope with a two years' old heifer in his mouth, and jumped over a
hedge twelve feet high, taking his burden over with him. In the same
region of southern Africa another lion was seen bearing off a horse at a
canter, the neck in his mouth and the body slung behind across his back.
According to one who hunted the animal in the interior of Africa, a lion
one day sprang on an ox, his hind feet on the quarters, his fore feet
about the horns, and drew the head backward with such force as to break
the back of the animal. On another occasion the same hunter saw a lion
who took a heifer in his mouth, and though its legs trailed on the
ground, he carried it off as a cat would a rat, and jumped across a wide
ditch without difficulty. These accounts of the lion's strength were
articles of faith with James Rounders. He had been told that the royal
Bengal tiger of Asia was the equal in strength, if not the superior, of
the African lion, he having been known to smash the head of a bullock by
a single blow of his paw; but this Rounders did not believe.

He read with some difficulty, moving his lips as he did so, in order to
get the matter clearly before his mind. He regarded it as a laborious
task, and would sooner have chopped a cord of wood than read for half an
hour. Notwithstanding the irksomeness of reading, there were two books
which led him conscientiously through their pages to the end--those of
Gordon Cumming and Jules Gerard on the hunting and killing of lions. The
two volumes comprised his library, and furnished his mind with all