of the lion has a _tuft_ of hair at the end; _no other
animal of the Cat Tribe has the tuft_.

Moreover, the tail of the lion or lioness hangs straight out from the
body; it is not naturally _curled_, like the tail of the ordinary cat or
other feline. But of course the lion can curl his tail for a moment, if
he wants to,--for instance, in order to whisk off a fly.

I shall now describe to you more fully these special qualities of the
lion.

The lion's mane is composed of long, bushy hair. The hair grows all
around his neck, and upon his shoulders. It begins to grow when he is
three years old, and continues to grow till he is about five years old.
A shorter growth of hair extends to the under part of the body of those
lions that live in colder regions.

You may have read in your geography that in the interior of Africa there
is a table-land, a part of which is about 6,000 feet high. There it is
generally cold, and especially at night. So, to protect them from the
cold, the lions that live there have a much thicker mane and more hair
on the under part of their bodies than the lions that live in the hot
lowlands nearer the sea.

When the lion lives in forest regions where there is plenty of
vegetation, his mane is usually brown in color and much darker than his
tawny yellow body. Why is that? Because the vegetation has both dark and
yellow patches, and so the lion looks very much like his surroundings,
and finds it easier to stalk his prey without being detected.

But when the lion lives in sandy or stony regions, the color of his mane
is more like that of his body, that is, yellow; so he appears to be very
much like the color of the sand or stones around him.

Once a lion and a lioness were drinking the water from a little pool in
the stony region. Two hunters happened to approach the place from
behind a large boulder. They were standing about twenty yards from the
lion and lioness, and yet they could not distinguish the animals. They
_heard_ the lapping of the water, and that is how they knew that the
animals were somewhere close to them.

As for the tuft of hair at the end of a lion's tail, nobody seems to
know why the lion has that tuft. The end of the tail has a hard nail, or
claw, and the tuft of hair may be meant to enclose the nail, and to
prevent it from being worn out against the ground. But nobody seems to
know why the nail itself is there, as the lion never uses it now.
Perhaps the nail had a use many