ook each other in the eyes."

"And another thing," continued Jackson, "trained animals love to 'show
off.' They're children. Those bears ENJOY doing those tricks. They ENJOY
the applause. They enjoy dancing to the 'Merry Widow Waltz.' And if you
lock them up in your jungle, they'll get so homesick that they'll give a
performance twice a day to the squirrels and woodpeckers."

"It's just as hard to unlearn a thing as to learn it," said Kelly
sententiously. "You can't make a man who has learned to wear shoes enjoy
going around in his bare feet."

"Rot!" cried Herrick. "Look at me. Didn't I love New York? I loved it so
I never went to bed for fear I'd miss something. But when I went 'Back
to the Land,' did it take me long to fall in love with the forests and
the green fields? It took me a week. I go to bed now the same day I get
up, and I've passed on my high hat and frock coat to a scarecrow. And
I'll bet you when those bears once scent the wild woods they'll stampede
for them like Croker going to a third alarm."

"And I repeat," cried Kelly, "you are a nature faker. And I'll leave it
to the bears to prove it."

"We have done our best," sighed Jackson. "We have tried to save him
money and trouble. And now all he can do for us in return is to give us
seats for the opening performance."

What the bears cost Herrick he never told. But it was a very large sum.
As the Countess Zichy pointed out, bears as bears, in a state of nature,
are cheap. If it were just a bear he wanted, he himself could go to
Pike County, Pennsylvania, and trap one. What he was paying for, she
explained, was the time she had spent in educating the Bruno family, and
added to that the time during which she must now remain idle while she
educated another family.

Herrick knew for what he was paying. It was the pleasure of rescuing
unwilling slaves from bondage. As to their expensive education, if
they returned to a state of ignorance as rapidly as did most college
graduates he knew, he would be satisfied. Two days later, when her
engagement at the music hall closed, Madame Zichy reluctantly turned
over her pets to their new manager. With Ikey she was especially loath
to part.

"I'll never get one like him," she wailed, "Ikey is the funniest
four-legged clown in America. He's a natural-born comedian. Folks think
I learn him those tricks, but it's all his own stuff. Only last week we
was playing Paoli's in Bridgeport, and when I was putting Bruno th