Almost the next moment Glyn was in the same state.
Chapter Ten.
“English Gentlemen don’t fight like that.”
The next morning the men sent by Ramball, the proprietor of the world-famed menagerie, were busy at work first thing repairing hedge and fence; and everything was so well done, and such prompt payment made for the estimated damages to the neighbouring orchard, that when a petition-like appeal for patronage was made by Ramball, the owner of the orchard attended with wife, family, and friends; and the Doctor gave permission to the whole school to be present, being moved also, as he told the lads in a brief address, to go himself with the masters and support a very worthy enterprise for the diffusion of natural history throughout the country. The visits were paid to the great yellow-walled prison, and Ramball, in his best blue coat, the one with the basket-work treble-gilt buttons, attended on the Doctor himself to explain the peculiarities of the beasts and give their history in his own fashion.
This was peculiar, and did not in any way resemble a zoological lecture. Still, it was an improvement upon the wild-beast showman of the old-fashioned fairs, and he did not inform his listeners that the tiger was eight feet six inches long from the tip of his nose to the end of his tail, and exactly eight 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.