ht feet four inches long from the tip of his
tail to the end of his nose. Neither did he impart knowledge, like
another of his craft, and tell people that the boa-constrictor was
so-called because he constructed such pleasing images with his
serpentine form. But he did inform them that the monstrous reptile he
possessed--one which, by the way, was only nine feet long--was always
furnished in the cold weather with sawdust into which he could burrow,
on account of the peculiarity always practised by creatures of its kind
of swallowing its own blankets; and he did deliver an eulogy on his big
black bear, and encourage the young gentlemen to furnish it with buns;
but he did not confess to the fact that it was his most profitable
animal, from the circumstance of his letting it out on hire for so many
months in the year to a hairdresser in Bloomsbury, who used, according
to his advertisements, to kill it regularly once a week and exhibit it
in butcherly fashion hung up and spread open outside his shop, so that
passers-by might see its tremendous state of fatness: "Another fat bear
killed this morning."

It was in the days when the British public were intense believers in
bear's grease as the producer of hair, and no one troubled himself or
herself to investigate the precise configuration of the exhibited animal
and compare it when hung up, decapitated, and shorn of its feet, with
the ordinary well-fatted domestic pig, albeit the illusion was kept up
by its being possible to see through the gratings outside the
shop-window Ramball's black bear still "all alive-o," parading and
snuffling up and down in the area.

Glyn and Singh were there, of course, and responded to Ramball's almost
obsequious advances with good-humoured tolerance; but while he was with
the Doctor the boys took notes together, laughing with a good deal of
contempt at the poor miserable specimens--the tiger and two leopards--
compared with those they had seen in their native beauty and grace of
outline in the forests of Dour.

They met one friend there, though, chained by a leg to the massive iron
peg, as he stood swinging his great head from side to side, and
stretching out his enormous trunk for the contributions supplied by the
boys.

They were welcomed most effusively by the great beast, which recognised
them at once, and it was only by its attention being taken up by its
keeper, the man who had driven the bottomless van, that the boys got
away witho