There were two kinds of lions in the menageries--those born and raised in the cages and those caught as whelps wild in Asia and Africa. A few full grown were caught in pits. The first time he entered a cage was in a small show in a provincial town. The two lions whom he then encountered were old and sick, and bore the scars of twenty years' whipping on their bald hides; besides, they were born and brought up behind the bars. They growled from force of habit, but there was not much danger in them. The posters of course announced the two brutes as two of the most ferocious kings of the forest. From these he passed to cage-bred lions in their prime, thence to the wild animals, of which Brutus was one. Until the tamer was able to work with these last, he was not considered as belonging to the rank of real tamers. The sensation he experienced the first time he entered the cage of wild animals was difficult to describe; it was an appreciation of imminent danger coupled with courage. When he issued from the cage his tights and spangled cloth felt as if they had just come out of the wash tub. He was steeled up to the point of bravery before the brutes, but ten minutes afterward a child could have knocked him over. The principal secret of managing the brutes was not to be afraid of them. When the man showed fear he was lost. The mastery was not acquired so much through violence of treatment as an absolute sense of security in their presence. Audacity and self-possession were necessary every minute, every second; a moment's loss of equilibrium might prove fatal. The buttery mode of treatment about which bookmen wrote had no existence in fact among showmen. No man managed his beasts with kindness. When his Brutus licked his face in his performance it looked affectionate, but it was not; he did it because he was afraid; and when the animal went through this osculatory business he was obliged to keep his eye on him with all the concentration of his will, for there was something in the beast's eyes which showed that he would sooner use his teeth than his tongue. There was an impression that a lion once tamed is tamed for good, as a horse is broken to harness. This was an error; the lion had to be tamed every day anew in order to keep him in subjection.