“The beast is at me again in an instant; again he goes down and again I lash him. I always keep the club handy, but never use it unless it is absolutely necessary. I keep drawing my chair a little closer to the animal as this goes on until I get so close he can touch me with his nose but cannot bite me. Then I just sit there and talk to him and you would be surprised at the power the human voice will finally be made to exercise over wild beasts. They seem to understand much that is said to them. “While I am talking just out of reach of their teeth,” he went on, “if they get ugly and attempt to spring at me I give them the rawhide. I keep this up, and after a dozen or fifteen lessons they get so they only snarl and growl at my entrance to the cage. As soon as I think it is safe I try the beasts without a chain. It is a little ticklish business at first but I have plenty of help ready for the first effort. If it is a success the first time, you generally have your beast mastered, although once in a while a brute that has been tractable enough will break out and go for his keeper. We had such a case once when an experienced lion tamer was clawed by a lioness and nearly killed. We usually cut the claws of the cat species, however. Lions will not stay in the same cage with tigers. We tried this once, putting a lioness in with a Bengal tiger. There was a fierce fight and the lioness nearly killed the Bengal.” Our keeper takes very little stock in the theory of the power of the human eye over wild beasts. The organ plays an insignificant part, he thinks; it is the power of the man behind the eye and the qualifications he possesses that are efficacious. [Illustration: REHEARSING IN WINTER QUARTERS.] “It is a pretty thing to say, and that is all,” he said. “The man who wants to subdue a wild beast has to be fearless and go about his task in a courageous way, and of course the eye plays its part. The man who attempted to handle a wild beast that was not chained, with nothing else than a fearless eye would be in a pretty bad hole, though. What the man must have is a good heart, plenty of pluck and lots of sand. The secret of successfully handling wild beasts is to become imbued with a confidence that all wild beasts are really cowardly, especially if they belong to the cat family. If you are not afraid and you know how to do it, it is easy enough.