I never failed, in my boyhood, to visit Wombwell's, or Atkins's show, whichever visited Croydon Fair, and could never sufficiently admire the gorgeously-uniformed bandsmen, whose brazen instruments brayed and blared from noon till night on the exterior platform, and the immense pictures, suspended from lofty poles, of elephants and giraffes, lions and tigers, zebras, boa constrictors, and whatever else was most wonderful in the brute creation, or most susceptible of brilliant colouring. The difference in the scale to which the zoological rarities within were depicted on the canvas, as compared with the figures of men that were represented, was a very characteristic feature of these pictorial displays. The boa constrictor was given the girth of an ox, and the white bear should have been as large as an elephant, judged by the size of the sailors who were attacking him among his native ice-bergs. I have a perfect recollection of Wombwell's two famous lions, Nero and Wallace, and their keeper, "Manchester Jack," as he was called, who used to enter Nero's cage, and sit upon the animal, open his mouth, etc. It is said that, when Van Amburgh arrived in England with his trained lions, tigers, and leopards, arrangements were made for a trial of skill and daring between him and Manchester Jack, which was to have taken place at Southampton, but fell through, owing to the American showing the white feather. The story seems improbable, for Van Amburgh's daring in his performances has never been excelled. Lion-tamers, like gymnasts, are generally killed half-a-dozen times by rumour, though they die in their beds in about the same proportion as other men; and I remember hearing an absurd story which conferred upon Manchester Jack the unenviable distinction of having his head bitten off by a lion. He was said to have been exhibiting the fool-hardy trick, with which Van Amburgh's name was so much associated, of putting his head in the lion's mouth, and to have been awakened to a sense of his temerity and its consequences by hearing the animal growl, and feeling its jaw close upon his neck. "Does he whisk his tail, Bill?" he was reported to have said to another keeper while in this horrible situation. "Yes," replied Bill. "Then I am a dead man!" groaned Manchester Jack. A moment afterwards, the lion snapped its formidable jaws, and bit off the keeper's head. Such was the story; but it is contradicted by the fact that Manchester Jack left the menagerie with a whole skin, and for many years afterwards kept an inn at Taunton, where he died in 1865.