booth and have something to eat.  The tables were ranged all around, and in the centre there was a boarded platform for dancing.  The ladies were there already dressed for partners; and the music was so lively, that I felt very much inclined to dance, but we had agreed to go and see the wild beasts fed at Mr. Polito’s menagerie, and as it was now almost eight o’clock, we paid our bill and set off.  It was a very curious sight, and better worth seeing than any thing in the fair; I never had an idea that there were so many strange animals in existence.  They were all secured in iron cages, and a large chandelier, with twenty lights, hung in the centre of the booth, and lighted them up, while the keeper went round and stirred them up with his long pole; at the same time he gave us their histories, which were very interesting.  I recollect a few of them.  There was the tapir, a great pig with a long nose, a variety of the hiptostomass, which the keeper said was an amphibious animal, as couldn’t live on land, and dies in the water—­however, it seemed to live very well in a cage.  Then there was the kangaroo with its young ones peeping out of it—­a most astonishing animal.  The keeper said that it brought forth two young ones at a birth, and then took them into its stomach again, until they arrived at years of discretion.  Then there was the pelican of the wilderness, (I shall not forget him,) with a large bag under his throat, which the man put on his head as a night-cap; this bird feeds its young with its own blood—­when fish are scarce.  And there was the laughing hyaena, who cries in the wood like a human being in distress, and devours those who come to his assistance—­a sad instance of the depravity of human nature, as the keeper observed.  There was a beautiful creature, the royal Bengal tiger, only three years old, what growed ten inches every year, and never arrived at its full growth.  The one we saw measured, as the keeper told us, sixteen feet from the snout to the tail, and seventeen feet from the tail to the snout; but there must have been some mistake there.  There was a young elephant and three lions, and several other animals, which I forget now, so I shall go on to describe the tragical scene which occurred.  The keeper had poked up all the animals, and had commenced feeding them.  The great lion was growling and snarling over the shin bone of an ox, cracking it like a nut, when by some mismanagement, one end of the pole upon which the chandelier was suspended fell down, striking the door of the cage in which the lioness was at supper, and bursting it open.  It was all done in a second; the chandelier fell, the cage opened, and the lioness sprung out.  I remember to this moment seeing the body of the lioness in the air, and then all as dark as pitch.  What a change! not a moment before all of us staring with delight and curiosity, and then to be left in darkness, horror and dismay!  There was such screaming and shrieking, such crying, and fighting, and pushing, and fainting,