Unfortunately the substitute had missed all this part of the act. He started out of the cage and George jumped at him and the man was not prepared to dodge. The moral seems to be that nobody should covet another man's job, not even that of lion taming. Some readers we suppose will find Mr. Conklin's lion stories unwelcome because they may tend to take away their illusions. It is not to be denied that he has to some extent rubbed the gilt off the gingerbread by writing that the record for all the lions he has known consists of one substitute trainer and a cow. His whole attitude toward lions is contemptuous in its calm and so is the attitude of practically everybody else in the book with the exception of the cow and the substitute trainer. Even they suffered a little, at first, from overconfidence. On the night down in Philadelphia when Wallace, the big lion, escaped from his cage in winter quarters nobody grew excited. O'Brien, the owner of the show, did not even get up, but called through the door "Go git Conklin!" The preparations of the trainer were simple. First he got an iron bar and then he found the lion and hit him on the end of the nose. "After a few minutes," he adds, "I had him safely locked in again." Lions, for all their air of authority, seem to be easily dominated. They're not so much wicked as weak. Anybody with a little firmness can twist them around a finger, possibly not the little finger, but any of the others. It is a great pity that lions should be like that. To be sure, the information ought not to come as a surprise to anybody who is familiar with the Bible. The condition we have mentioned has existed for a long time. As far as we know, Daniel had not so much as an iron bar when he went into the den. He overawed the lions with nothing more than faith. Perhaps it is not quite fair to go on as if lions were the only living creatures in all the world who are swayed and cowed by firmness and authority. The same weakness may be found now and then among men. All too many of us if hit on the nose with iron bars, either real ones or symbols, do little more than lions in similar circumstances. We may growl and roar a little, but we do not show resentment in any efficient way. And like the lions, we are singularly stupid in not making working alliances with our fellows against the man with the iron bar. By and by we begin to go through the hoops as if the procedure were inevitable. Having made a protest we feel that our duty is done.