168 WILD NEIGHBORS CHAP. 
amphitheatre. Six hundred were provided by 
Pompey for a single festival. 
It was with the idea of reviving something 
of the glory of those old shows that an arrange- 
ment was made at the Paris Hippodrome, re- 
cently, for the exhibition of lions upon a grand 
scale. Instead of a cage mounted upon a wagon, 
these bold managers proposed an arena, and in 
place of one lion a score. 
When the time comes in the programme for 
the introduction of this “act,” the hippodrome 
is cleared, and the audience awaits in tense silence 
what is to come. Suddenly, out of the ground 
arises a palisade of sharp iron pickets twenty 
feet high and curved inward at their top. It 
encloses an oval fifty yards long and twenty 
yards wide. The moment it ceases to rise, and 
stands fixed in its slot, an opening appears in the 
centre where flooring has been removed, and half 
a dozen men, dressed like Roman gladiators, and 
each bearing a whip and a steel trident, enter 
by a little gate. They shut this securely behind 
them, and take their positions. They are none 
too soon, for already, pushed upward upon a 
platform-elevator, which rises like a stage-trap 
in a theatre to fill the central opening, are com- 
ing a drove of lions and lionesses. They growl 
and roar as their great manes and restless bodies 
rise above the surface, arousing the greetings of 
the audience. 
