"I don't know," said Norton. "As far as to you or me, I guess. Or else over all our heads, to get at that coloured woman."
The woman was sweeping the floor, a little way behind the two talkers, and heard them. "Yes!" she said, "he'd want me fust thing, sure."
"Why?" whispered Matilda.
"Likes the dark meat best," said Norton. "Fact, Pink; they say they do."
Matilda gazed with a new fascination on the beautiful, terrible creatures. Could it be possible, that those very animals had actually tasted "dark meat" at home?
"Yes," said Norton; "there are hundreds of the natives carried off and eaten by the tigers, I heard a gentleman telling mother, every year, in the province of Bengal alone. Come, Pink; we can look at these fellows again; I want you to see some of the others before they are fed."
They went on, with less delay, till they came to the Russian bear. At the great blocks of ice in his cage Matilda marvelled.
"Is he so warm!" she said. "In this weather?"
"This room's pretty comfortable," said Norton; "and to him I suppose it's as bad as a hundred and fifty degrees of the thermometer would be to us. He's accustomed to fifty degrees below zero."
"I don't know what 'below zero' means, exactly," said Matilda. "But then those great pieces of ice cannot do him much good?"