“He jerked himself to and fro across his cramped, rickety cage and looked over my head with yellow eyes—­at some phantom far away.  Every now and then he snarled.  The contempt of his detestable indifference sank deeper and deeper into my soul.  I knew that were the cage to vanish I should stand there motionless, his helpless prey.  I knew that were he at large in the same building with me I should be too terror-stricken to escape him.  At the foot of a ladder leading clear to escape I should have awaited him paralyzed.  At last I gripped my nurse’s hand.  ‘Take me away,’ I whispered.

“In my dreams that night he stalked me.  I made my frozen flight from him, I slammed a door on him, and he thrust his paw through a panel as though it had been paper and clawed for me.  The paw got longer and longer. . . .

“I screamed so loudly that my father came up from his study.

“I remember that he took me in his arms.

“‘It’s only a big sort of pussy, Poff,’ he said.  ’FELIS Tigris.  FELIS, you know, means cat.’

“But I knew better.  I was in no mood then for my father’s insatiable pedagoguery.

“‘And my little son mustn’t be a coward.’ . . .

“After that I understood I must keep silence and bear my tigers alone.

“For years the thought of that tiger’s immensity haunted my mind.  In my dreams I cowered before it a thousand times; in the dusk it rarely failed me.  On the landing on my way to bed there was a patch of darkness beyond a chest that became a lurking horror for me, and sometimes the door of my father’s bedroom would stand open and there was a long buff and crimson-striped shape, by day indeed an ottoman, but by night—.  Could an ottoman crouch and stir in the flicker of a passing candle?  Could an ottoman come after you noiselessly, and so close that you could not even turn round upon it?  No!”

5

When Benham was already seventeen and, as he supposed, hardened against his fear of beasts, his friend Prothero gave him an account of the killing of an old labouring man by a stallion which had escaped out of its stable.  The beast had careered across a field, leapt a hedge and come upon its victim suddenly.  He had run a few paces and stopped, trying to defend his head with the horse rearing over him.  It beat him down with two swift blows of its fore hoofs, one, two, lifted him up in its long yellow teeth and worried him as a terrier does a rat—­the poor old wretch was still able to make a bleating sound at that—­dropped him, trampled and kicked him as he tried to crawl away, and went on trampling and battering him until he was no more than a bloody inhuman bundle of clothes and mire.  For more than half an hour this continued, and then its animal rage was exhausted and it desisted, and went and grazed at a little distance from this misshapen, hoof-marked, torn, and muddy remnant of a man.  No one it seems but a horror-stricken child knew what was happening. . . .