immemorial enemies
from the wild. But he had travelled too far, seen too much, and was
altogether too sensible, to attack them. Instead, walking stiff-legged
and circumspectly, but smelling with all his nose the strange scent of
the creatures, he followed at the end of his chain his own captor god.

Continually a multitude of strange scents invaded his nostrils. Although
he could not see through walls, he got the smells he was later to
identify of lions, leopards, monkeys, baboons, and seals and sea-lions.
All of which might have stunned an ordinary dog; but the effect on him
was to make him very alert and at the same time very subdued. It was as
if he walked in a new and monstrously populous jungle and was
unacquainted with its ways and denizens.

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 cr