The manager, treasurer, cook, pantryman, such gentlemen as had been left to make their breakfast toilets without boots or other more necessary articles of apparel, and all the ladies even to Madame Lowe herself, were of the anti-bear party. All the performers, except those who had been ravished of wigs and tights or other miscellaneous pieces of wardrobe, the engineer of the gas-machine which furnished light for the whole establishment, all the prize-fighters, and, in a word, all the reckless characters of the two boats, headed by the determined Professor himself, marched, as I may say, figuratively, under the banner of the bear. The factions were about equally divided, and equally impressed with the merit of their respective causes. We of the bear party, however, had one manifest advantage. The captain of the boats, jolly old William McCracken--as fat as he was jolly, and as honest as he was fat--was on our side. Such a state of feeling could not, as may be well imagined, exist for any long time among so many people, and in the narrow limits of those two boats, without some act of aggression from one side or the other. And it came. One of the prize-fighters, perhaps in simple defiance to the opposition, and perhaps in a burst of honest sympathy with the cub himself--I cannot say which, for he was of my party--purloined from the dressing-room and presented to young Bruin, in his durance, a pair of cast-off pantaloons in which a certain minstrel was in the habit of performing his great act of the “comb solo.” Of course, the actor was indignant; and, whether in bodily fear of the prize-fighter, or believing what he said, maintained that the infernal bear had been loose again, and vowed that he would have his life. The act of the prize-fighter was certainly ill-advised and hazardous, not merely to the pantaloons, but to the bear himself. I mention it as only one more instance of the danger in which one stands from his own friends, especially if he chance to be at all prominent in times of great partisan strife. The cub’s enemies now clamored more loudly than ever against him, stoutly asserting that chains and gas-rooms were not strong enough to hold him; and the ladies were still more sure that he would bite. One young mother, I remember, related that she had heard of a well-authenticated instance wherein a single bear, I think she said, had come out of the woods and massacred and devoured forty children. In the middle of the night after the presentation of the pantaloons, a disguised band, headed, it was afterwards supposed, by the comb-soloist himself, stealthily gained the prison of the bear, broke his chain, and threw him overboard. The next morning triumph was in the faces of the opposition, and surprise and grief in the hearts of Professor Lowe and his liegemen.