There was a mouse, which was irresistible¹. There were two chaffinches, husband and wife, which built their nest right before our eyes, and a snail², which had no secrets for us. And there were flowers, yellow and white, and there were green leaves, which told us the oddest adventures: in fact, as much as we can find room for in our little head.

 

Now we are sitting on a bench and digesting our impressions.

 

Suddenly the air is shaken by a tremendous roar:

 

"What was that?" asks my little boy.

 

"That was the lion in the Zoological Gardens," I reply.

 

No sooner have I said this than I curse my own stupidity.

 

I might have said that it was a gunshot announcing the birth of a prince; or an earthquake; or a china dish falling from the sky and breaking into pieces: anything whatever, rather than the truth.

 

For now my little boy wants to know what sort of thing the Zoological Gardens is.

 

I tell him.

 

The Zoological Gardens is a horrid³ place, where they lock up wild beasts who have done no wrong and who are accustomed to walk about freely in the distant foreign countries where they come from. The lion is there, whom we have just heard roaring. He is so strong that he can kill a policeman with one blow of his paw; he has great, haughty⁴ eyes and awfully⁵ sharp teeth. He lives in Africa and, at night, when he roars, all the other beasts tremble in their holes for fear. He is called the king of beasts. They caught him one day in a cunning trap and bound him and dragged him here and locked him up in a cage with iron bars to it. The cage is no more than half as big as Petrine's room. And there the king walks up and down, up and down, and gnashes his teeth with sorrow and rage and roars so that you can hear him ever so far away. Outside his cage stand cowardly people and laugh at him, because he can't get out and eat them up, and

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