“It’s many years now since I left the show business, and I’ve thought the whole thing over, and concluded it’s all wrong. The confinement is unnatural and cruel. Even the little animals in cages, while they seem to be happy, are as miserable as they can be. Take a careful look at them when they are not tired out or asleep, and you will find an anxious expression on all their faces—a sort of looking out of their cages for some one to come along and open the door.
“The great cat tribe, Lions, Tigers, Leopards, Panthers, and the rest of them, are always pushing their noses against the bars for liberty, and are usually pretty cross because they can’t get it.
“At any rate, it’s pleasant for me to look back upon my many years of intercourse with the poor creatures, and to feel that I never, save in the single instance, treated one of them unkindly.”
Assisting in the two years of successful management of Columbus was the inevitable “elephant dog,” who was his constant companion and friend. They slept together nights and tramped side by side during the days, and often, when the elephant would not obey his keeper, the faithful companion would, in some mysterious way, induce his huge friend to do the reasonable and behave himself like a respectable and order loving beast.
I have forgotten the manner of the taking off of the old slave of the “Show,” but he, with his friendly keeper, who to the end of his days was his champion, have long since passed on to that mysterious resting place from which neither man nor elephant have sent any message back, and let us hope that after their many trampings, and as a reward for the many miseries endured while upon earth, that they are now enjoying the rewards bestowed upon the forgiven and blest.
IN RELATION TO MYSTERIES
The relation of the three unusual incidents following these introductory words are only simple statements of facts for each reader to solve in his own way. Concerning them I have no theory whatever, and avow emphatically an entire disbelief in their sometimes alleged supernatural origin. That, for the present at least, they are inexplicable must be admitted, but that they will always remain within the realm of mysteries beyond the power of solution is very doubtful.
Up to the present time many accepted, or rather seeming, mysteries, which, with the assistance of ages, have crystallized into form, have been permitted to pass unchallenged, but the time has arrived when the old fields, now almost sacred groves, where superstition has taken root and blossomed, are about to be explored. The almost omnipotent search-light of science is turning its rays into the dark nooks and corners of complacent ignorance, greatly to the discomfiture of many old theories and beliefs, whose foundations are as unsubstantial as dreams.
Until the possibly far-off culmination of the great scientific epoch, new mysteries known only to the laboratories of Nature will continue to be born. But those who have watched the progress of scientific achievement, through the last half of the Nineteenth Century, must believe that, within the next like period, the visible manifestations of secrets coming from the bosom of Nature (of which the outer shell now only is seen) will have been ascertained to belong to a previously undiscovered series of natural phenomena.