The animals rushed forward into the battle; the big lion with an ugly snarl leaped from his pedestal into the thick of the fray, and in an instant twenty-seven lions were fighting with teeth and claws. In the midst of it all stood one man, calm, self-possessed, but with every nerve and muscle at their highest tension, for he knew better than any one else that his life hung in the balance.
Bonavita vainly tried to regain mastery over the fighting beasts. The lions were no longer the puppets of a show; they were the monarchs of the wild, turbulent and savage.
Seeing his power gone, Bonavita did his best to save his own life. He succeeded in getting out, thanks to his wonderful nerve—for he had to jump over the backs of the fighting animals, and in doing so he received a deep wound in the shoulder.
There was nothing to be done but to let the lions fight it out, which they did. For nearly two hours that awful battle raged; but, when the lions were exhausted, Bonavita, wounded as he was, went in and drove them into their cages.
Many of the lions after this terrible fight were seriously injured, and had to be treated for wounds, cuts, and tears; but they had fought themselves out, and the next week they went through their performances as mildly as kittens.
[DREDGING FOR GOLD.]
The many varying conditions under which gold is found is not the least interesting feature of the history of the yellow metal. In rock, sand, and sea it has been discovered, and even in the deposit of hot springs now in activity. Large nuggets have been discovered in dry gravels, while prospectors have acquired much wealth by extracting gold from river beds, by the process known as panning—i. e., separating the dirt and mud from the metal by shaking the gold-bearing earth or gravel with water in a pan.
While, however, many rivers have been thus exploited, explorers and scientists are agreed that there are still millions of dollars' worth of gold waiting to be unearthed from the bottom of rivers in different parts of the world. In New Zealand and South America, for instance, convincing proof has been obtained that rich deposits of the precious metal still lie at the bottom of many of the rivers of those countries. The gold is usually found in the form of grains at some depth below the surface, imbedded in mud and clay.
There are only two ways of recovering it—namely, either the river bed must be dredged by floating dredgers, or the river must be diverted into another channel while its bed is being stripped. The former method is the one generally adopted, dredgers having been used with considerable success on the Pacific Slope.