GAGGING. 
.155 
leisure with the pistol which he holds in his left 
hand.” 
* With every submission to Mr. Layard, I take the above to be a 
fable. If the lion quietly walked up to a man on his hind legs, as 
the bear is at times said to do, it might be possible to gag him, but 
when we recollect that the lion is accustomed to bound on his prey, 
that is, with a force almost sufficient to upset the Monument, the 
thing seems to me all but impracticable. Besides, is a man’s 
life to depend on a pistol, and that in his left hand P Why, twenty 
to thirty balls, and. those tolerably well placed, are often insufficient, 
as has been already shown, or will be shown in these pages, to 
kill the beast. Layard, to my notions, had much better stick to his 
excavations rather than attempt to stick such fictions into the 
public.—E d. 
