than do the owners of the many shows whose
harvest time is the brief summer season at Coney Island. Bad weather,
especially if it comes on the first or last day of the week or a legal
holiday, means a loss of hundreds of dollars to them, for if the skies
are threatening, the holiday makers seek their pleasures nearer home and
there are fewer people to give up their dimes and quarters under the
seductive wheedling of the "barkers." Most of the show people look
anxiously at the sky before retiring for the night, but there is one of
them who finds an absolutely reliable forecast within the walls of his
own building. Perhaps the signs and portents could not be translated by
the weather clerk, but the Proprietor of the trained animal exhibition
at Dreamland has been all of his life the companion of his charges, and
has learned to recognize the meaning of unusual behavior or the shade of
change in their voices which indicates an approaching storm.

There was not a cloud to be seen, and every star in the heavens was
trying to rival the brilliant electric lights on the great tower as he
sat at the cafe table in front of the Arena with the Stranger and the
Press Agent after the night's performance was over, but he gave an
exclamation of disappointment as a half-smothered roar came from the
throat of one of the lions in the building.

"Rain to-morrow!" he said as the grumbling roar spread from cage to cage
about the great semicircle. His companions smiled incredulously as they
looked at the cloudless sky, but he repeated his prediction when the
Stranger read "Fair and warmer to-morrow" from one of the evening
papers. "I know all about the 'high and low pressure areas,'" he said,
as he glanced at the chart. "A man in the show business has to study
everything which may influence the attendance, but the behavior of my
animals is a better barometer for local conditions than any aneroid
which the Weather Bureau owns. In spite of the clear sky and the
official predictions, I would wager that we shall have a bad storm
within the next twenty-four hours, for those lions have the inherited
knowledge of hundreds of generations of jungle-bred ancestors whose food
supply depended largely upon the weather conditions."

"Do the other animals possess the same barometric accomplishments?"
asked the Stranger skeptically, and the Proprietor laughed as he invited
him to come inside and judge for himself. The Arena was always an
uncanny place at ni