It seemed to hum like a great hive already; there was a crowd of the poorer class about it, and men came continually in and out of the little doors in its base.

We dismissed our carriage at the outer edge of the ragged ground, the driver insisting he could drive no farther.  And the moment we had alighted he turned his horses’ heads and started them at a furious gallop back to the city in the hope of catching another fare.

We walked forwards towards the principal of the wickets through which already the people were passing to their seats.  In approaching the bull-ring we had to pass by a circle of little buildings, low dens with small barred windows and closed doors.  Blood was trickling from under some of these over the brown and dusty earth, and the low, heavy breathing and groans of a horse in agony came from one or another at intervals.

I looked through the grated slit of one, as I passed, and saw two men, or, rather, fiends in the shape of men, crouched on the floor of the dark and noisome den.  Between them lay outstretched the body of a horse, old and thin, worn to the last gasp in the cruel service of the streets.  On its flank was a long open wound.  One of the men, bending over it, had a red-hot iron glowing in his hand.  What they were going to do I could not tell, and I did not wait to see.

The horse was one, doubtless, which unhappily had survived last Sunday’s bull-fight, and was being horribly patched up, terribly stimulated by agony to expend its last spark of vitality in this.

In these loathsome little dens this fiendish work goes on, the poor mangled brutes are brought out from the ring, their gaping wounds are plugged with straw, or anything that is at hand, and then they are thrust back on to the horns of the bull.

More than ever filled with loathing of my kind, I passed on in silence towards the ring.

It was no use speaking to Suzee.  She could not understand what I felt.  I thought of Viola.  If she had been here, what would she have suffered?  Of all women I had met, I had never known one who had the same exquisite compassion, the same marvellous sympathy for all living things as she had.

We shewed our tickets, passed through the wicket, and were inside the vast circle.

The impression on the eye as one enters is pleasing, or would be if one’s brain were not there to tell one of the scenes of infamy that take place in that grand arena.

Wide circles, great sweeping lines have always a certain fascination, and the form that charms one in the coliseum is here also in these modern imitations.

The huge arena, empty now and clean, sprinkled with fine white sand, and with circle after circle, tier after tier of countless seats rising up all round, cutting at last the blue sky overhead, is in itself impressive.

We passed to our seats, which were a little low down, not much raised above the level of the boarding running round the arena.