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 dist