As he was entering the arena, he shied off to the side more stiff-leggedly than ever, bristled all along his neck and back, and growled deep and low in his throat.  For, emerging from the arena, came five elephants.  Small elephants they were, but to him they were the hugest of monsters, in his mind comparable only with the cow-whale of which he had caught fleeting glimpses when she destroyed the schooner Mary Turner.  But the elephants took no notice of him, each with its trunk clutching the tail of the one in front of it as it had been taught to do in making an exit.

Into the arena, he came, the bears following on his heels.  It was a sawdust circle the size of a circus ring, contained inside a square building that was roofed over with glass.  But there were no seats about the ring, since spectators were not tolerated.  Only Harris Collins and his assistants, and buyers and sellers of animals and men in the profession, were ever permitted to behold how animals were tormented into the performance of tricks to make the public open its mouth in astonishment or laughter.

Michael forgot about the bears, who were quickly at work on the other side of the circle from that to which he was taken.  Some men, rolling out stout bright-painted barrels which elephants could not crush by sitting on, attracted his attention for a moment.  Next, in a pause on the part of the man who led him, he regarded with huge interest a piebald Shetland pony.  It lay on the ground.  A man sat on it.  And ever and anon it lifted its head from the sawdust and kissed the man.  This was all Michael saw, yet he sensed something wrong about it.  He knew not why, had no evidence why, but he felt cruelty and power and unfairness.  What he did not see was the long pin in the man’s hand.  Each time he thrust this in the pony’s shoulder, the pony, stung by the pain and reflex action, lifted its head, and the man was deftly ready to meet the pony’s mouth with his own mouth.  To an audience the impression would be that in such fashion the pony was expressing its affection for the master.

Not a dozen feet away another Shetland, a coal-black one, was behaving as peculiarly as it was being treated.  Ropes were attached to its forelegs, each rope held by an assistant, who jerked on the same stoutly when a third man, standing in front of the pony, tapped it on the knees with a short, stiff whip of rattan.  Whereupon the pony went down on its knees in the sawdust in a genuflection to the man with the whip.  The pony did not like it, sometimes so successfully resisting with spread, taut legs and mutinous head-tossings, as to overcome the jerk of the ropes, and, at the same time wheeling, to fall heavily on its side or to uprear as the pull on the ropes was relaxed.  But always it was lined up again to face the man who rapped its knees with the rattan.  It was being taught merely how to kneel in the way that is ever a delight to the audiences who see only the results of the schooling and never dream of the manner of the schooling.  For, as Michael was quickly sensing, knowledge was here learned by pain.  In short, this was the college of pain, this Cedarwild Animal School.