"His courage had not forsaken him, but his strength had. He was no longer the proudly aggressive wild beast he had been. He had reached his limit. The terrible ordeal he had been through; the struggle incident to his capture; the rough, hot ride to the corral, hog-tied, on the hard floor of the dead-ax wagon; the outbursts of passion in the corral; the fighting and second roping in connection with the sawing off of his horns; the battle with the big horse; the ceaseless violence of his destructive assaults, first in the car, then in the crate, continued for three days and nights, had finally undermined even his iron frame; so when at last he found himself free on the ground, he presented a truly pitiful picture. "With his head bent to one side and back curved, with one ear up and the other down, and with a dejected, helpless expression on his face, he hobbled wearily away, barely able to step without falling. Slowly he made his way to the river, waded in, drank, crossed to the far side, staggered laboriously up the low bank, and lay down. The next day he was found in the same spot,--dead." THE DEFENSE OF THE HOME AND FAMILY. Any man who is too cowardly to fight for his home and country deserves to live and die homeless and without a country. With this subject of courage the parental and fraternal affections of wild animals are inseparably linked. The defense of the home and family unit is the foundation of all courage, and of all fighting qualities in man or animals. The gospel of self-defense is the first plank in the platform of the home defenders. Obviously, the head of a family cannot permit himself to be knocked out, because as the chief fighter in the Home Defense League it is his bounden duty to preserve his strength and his weapons, and remain fit. In the days of the club, the stone axe and the flint arrow-head, men were few and feeble, and the wild beasts had no cause to fear extermination. Tooth, claw and horn were about as formidable as the clumsy and inadequate weapons of man. The wild species went on developing naturally, and some mighty hosts were the result. But gunpowder changed all that. In the chase it gave weak men their innings beside the strong. Man could kill at long range, with little danger to himself, or even with none at all. And then in the wild beast world the great final struggle for existence began. Man's flippant phrase,--"the survival of the fittest,"-- became charged with sinister and deadly meaning.