"Well, Billy, how do you like being caged?" asked the animal keeper.
"Yes, you vicious beast, you, how do you like being shut up where you can't butt and send people flying into mud-puddles and chew up their wigs, etc.?" asked the ring-master who had joined the animal keeper.
"Oh, it is you, is it? Well, you just wait until I get out of here and see where I will butt you next time, and the animal keeper, too," bleated Billy, but neither of them understood what he said.
When they left him alone Billy tried every way he could think of to break out, but he could make no impression on the iron bars, chew as he would,—in fact, he broke one of his teeth trying. Then he tried butting out the ends of the cage, but it was of no use. Next he stood on his hind legs and tried to push the roof off with his long horns, but to no effect; so he lay down tired and broken-hearted on the hard bottom of the cage and gave himself up to the blues.
He was lying there quietly, apparently asleep, when a man brought him a bundle of hay to eat, a bucket of water to drink and a pitch-fork of straw to lie on.
Billy did not move when they brought the things, pretending to be asleep, but he was rudely awakened out of his supposed sleep by the man sticking the prongs of the pitch-fork into him to make him get up so he could spread the straw on the bottom of the cage. He felt too disheartened to eat, especially food which he detested, but thought he would take a drink as he was very thirsty, but at one smell of the bucket he turned up his aristocratic nose for he detected the bucket had not been washed since it had been used by some of the other animals for he could smell and see their hairs on the rim; so he lay down more disgusted than ever. Poor Billy's confinement was going to be hard for him. He had roamed the fields and towns, master of himself, too long to take to being shut up easily.
At last Billy fell asleep and only awakened when they hitched the horses to the wagon-like cage he was in to draw it to the depot. Just before they started he heard a man say: "Here, you forgot to put up the sides on that cage with the goat in."
Then the man brought wooden sides and fastened them onto the cage over the iron bars. This left Billy only a little iron barred opening near the top, at one side, to get air through.
"I shall surely smother," thought Billy. "Oh, this is horrible! I feel as if I were buried alive."
At that minute the horses started up and poor Billy went down on his knees with a sudden jerk.