"Great heavens! What a woman!" cried the captain, and stamped with
fury. "Not without reason have I been trembling and in fear of her
from the first time I saw her! It must have been a warning of fate
that I stopped playing _écarté_ with her. It was also a bad omen that
I passed so many sleepless nights. Was there ever mortal in a worse
perplexity than I am? How can I leave her alone without a protector,
loving her, as I do, more than my own life? And, on the other hand,
how can I marry her, after all my declaimings against marriage?"

Then turning to Augustias--"What would they say of me in the club?
What would people say of me, if they met me in the street with a woman
on my arm, or if they found me at home, just about to feed a child in
swaddling clothes? I--to have children? To worry about them? To live
in eternal fear that they might fall sick or die? Augustias, believe
me, as true as there is a God above us, I am absolutely unfit for it!
I should behave in such a way that after a short while you would call
upon heaven either to be divorced or to become a widow. Listen to my
advice: do not marry me, even if I ask you."

"What a strange creature you are," said the young woman, without
allowing herself to be at all discomposed, and sitting very erect in
her chair. "All that you are only telling to yourself! From what do
you conclude that I wish to be married to you; that I would accept
your offer, and that I should not prefer living by myself, even if I
had to work day and night, as so many girls do who are orphans?"

"How do I come to that conclusion?" answered the captain with the
greatest candor. "Because it cannot be otherwise. Because we love each
other. Because we are drawn to each other. Because a man such as I,
and a woman such as you, cannot live in any other way! Do you suppose
I do not understand that? Don't you suppose I have reflected on it
before now? Do you think I am indifferent in your good name and
reputation? I have spoken plainly in order to speak, in order to fly
from my own conviction, in order to examine whether I can escape from
this terrible dilemma which is robbing me of my sleep, and whether I
can possibly find an expedient so that I need not marry you--to do
which I shall finally be compelled, if you stand by your resolve to
make your way alone!"

"Alone! Alone!" repeated Augustias, roguishly. "And why not with a
worthier companion? Who tells you that I shall not some day meet a man
whom I like, and who is not afraid to marry me?"

"Augustias! let us skip that!" growled the captain, his face turning
scarlet.

"And why should we not talk about it?"

"Let us pass over that, and let me say, at the same time, that I will
murder the man who dares to ask for your hand. But it is madness on
my part to be angry without any reason. I am not so dull as not to see
how we two stand. Shall I tell you? We love each other. Do not tell me
I am mistaken! That would be lying. And here is the proof: if you did
not love me, I, too, should not love you! Let us try to meet one
another halfway. I ask for a delay of ten years. When I shall have
completed my half century, and when, a feeble old man, I shall have
become familiar with the idea of slavery, then we will marry without
anyone knowing about it. We will leave Madrid, and go to the country,
where we shall have no spectators, where there will be nobody to make
fun of me. But until this happens, please take half of my income
secretly, and without any human soul ever knowing anything about it.
You continue to live here, and I remain in my house. We will see each
other, but only in the presence of witnesses--for instance, in
society. We will write to each other every day. So as not to endanger
your good name, I will never pass through this street, and on Memorial
Day only we will go to the cemetery together with Rosa."

Augustias could not but smile at the last proposal of the good
captain, and her smile was not mocking, but contented and happy, as if
some cherished hope had dawned in her heart, as if it were the first
ray of the sun of happiness which was about to rise in her heaven! But
being a woman--though as brave and free from artifices as few of
them--she yet managed to subdue the signs of joy rising within her.
She acted as if she cherished not the slightest hope, and said with a
distant coolness which is usually the special and genuine sign of
chaste reserve:

"You make yourself ridiculous with your peculiar conditions. You
stipulate for the gift of an engagement-ring, for which nobody has yet
asked you."

"I know still another way out--for a compromise, but that is really
the last one. Do you fully understand, my young lady from Aragon? It
is the last way out, which a man, also from Aragon, begs leave to
explain to you."

She turned her head and looked straight into his eyes, with an
expression indescribably earnest, captivating, quiet, and full of
expectation.

The captain had never seen her features so beautiful and expressive;
at that moment she looked to him like a queen.

"Augustias," said, or rather stammered, this brave soldier, who had
been under fire a hundred times, and who had made such a deep
impression on the young girl through his charging under a rain of
bullets like a lion, "I have the honor to ask for your hand on one
certain, essential, unchangeable condition. Tomorrow morning--today--a
soon as the papers are in order--as quickly as possible. I can live
without you no longer!"

The glances of the young girl became milder, and she rewarded him for
his decided heroism with a tender and bewitching smile.

"But I repeat that it is on one condition," the bold warrior hastened
to repeat, feeling that Augustias's glances made him confused and
weak.

"On what condition?" asked the young girl, turning fully round, and
now holding him under the witchery of her sparkling black eyes.

"On the condition," he stammered, "that, in case we have children, we
send them to the orphanage. I mean--on this point I will never yield.
Well, do you consent? For heaven's sake, say yes!"

"Why should I not consent to it, Captain Veneno?" answered Augustias,
with a peal of laughter. "You shall take them there yourself, or,
better still, we both of us will take them there. And we will give
them up without kissing them, or anything else! Don't you think we
shall take them there?"

Thus spoke Augustias, and looked at the captain with exquisite joy in
her eyes. The good captain thought he would die of happiness; a flood
of tears burst from his eyes; he folded the blushing girl in his arms,
and said:

"So I am lost?"

"Irretrievably lost, Captain Veneno," answered Augustias.

       *       *       *       *       *

One morning in May, 1852--that is, four years after the scene just
described--a friend of mine, who told me this story, stopped his horse
in front of a mansion on San Francisco Avenue, in Madrid; he threw the
reins to his groom, and asked the long-coated footman who met him at
the door:

"Is your master at home?"

"If your honor will be good enough to walk upstairs, you will find
him in the library. His excellency does not like to have visitors
announced. Everybody can go up to him directly."

"Fortunately I know the house thoroughly," said the stranger to
himself, while he mounted the stairs. "In the library! Well, well, who
would have thought of Captain Veneno ever taking to the sciences?"

Wandering through the rooms, the visitor met another servant, who
repeated, "The master is in the library." And at last he came to the
door of the room in question, opened it quickly, and stood, almost
turned to stone for astonishment, before the remarkable group which it
offered to his view.

In the middle of the room, on the carpet which covered the floor, a
man was crawling on all-fours. On his back rode a little fellow about
three years old, who was kicking the man's sides with his heels.
Another small boy, who might have been a year and a half old, stood in
front of the man's head, and had evidently been tumbling his hair. One
hand held the father's neckerchief, and the little fellow was tugging
at it as if it had been a halter, shouting with delight in his merry
child's voice:

"Gee up, donkey! Gee up!

The first effect of what used to be called natural philosophy is to fill its devotee with wonder at the marvels of God. This explains why the pursuit of science, so long as it remains superficial, is not incompatible with the most naif sort of religious faith. But the moment the student of the sciences passes this stage of childlike amazement and begins to investigate the inner workings of natural phenomena, he begins to see how ineptly many of them are managed, and so he tends to pass from awe of the Creator to criticism of the Creator, and once he has crossed that bridge he has ceased to be a believer. One finds plenty of neighborhood physicians, amateur botanists, high-school physics teachers and other such quasi-scientists in the pews on Sunday, but one never sees a Huxley there, or a Darwin, or an Ehrlich.

I often wonder how much sound and nourishing food is fed to the animals in the zoological gardens of America every week, and try to figure out what the public gets in return for the cost thereof. The annual bill must surely run into millions; one is constantly hearing how much beef a lion downs at a meal, and how many tons of hay an elephant dispatches in a month. And to what end? To the end, principally, that a horde of superintendents and keepers may be kept in easy jobs. To the end, secondarily, that the least intelligent minority of the population may have an idiotic show to gape at on Sunday afternoons, and that the young of the species may be instructed in the methods of amour prevailing among chimpanzees and become privy to the technic employed by jaguars, hyenas and polar bears in ridding themselves of lice.

So far as I can make out, after laborious visits to all the chief zoos of the nation, no other imaginable purpose is served by their existence. One hears constantly, true enough (mainly from the gentlemen they support) that they are educational. But how? Just what sort of instruction do they radiate, and what is its value? I have never been able to find out. The sober truth is that they are no more educational than so many firemen's parades or displays of sky-rockets, and that all they actually offer to the public in return for the taxes wasted upon them is a form of idle and witless amusement, compared to which a visit to a penitentiary, or even to Congress or a state legislature in session, is informing, stimulating and ennobling.

Education your grandmother! Show me a schoolboy who has ever learned anything valuable or important by watching a mangy old lion snoring away in its cage or a family of monkeys fighting for peanuts. To get any useful instruction out of such a spectacle is palpably impossible; not even a college professor is improved by it. The most it can imaginably impart is that the stripes of a certain sort of tiger run one way and the stripes of another sort some other way, that hyenas and polecats smell worse than Greek 'bus boys, that the Latin name of the raccoon (who was unheard of by the Romans) is Procyon lotor. For the dissemination of such banal knowledge, absurdly emitted and defectively taken in, the taxpayers of the United States are mulcted in hundreds of thousands of dollars a year. As well make them pay for teaching policemen the theory of least squares, or for instructing roosters in the laying of eggs.

But zoos, it is argued, are of scientific value. They enable learned men to study this or that. Again the facts blast the theory. No scientific discovery of any value whatsoever, even to the animals themselves, has ever come out of a zoo. The zoo scientist is the old woman of zoology, and his alleged wisdom is usually exhibited, not in the groves of actual learning, but in the yellow journals. He is to biology what the late Camille Flammarion was to astronomy, which is to say, its court jester and reductio ad absurdum. When he leaps into public notice with some new pearl of knowledge, it commonly turns out to be no more than the news that Marie Bashkirtseff, the Russian lady walrus, has had her teeth plugged with zinc and is expecting twins. Or that Pishposh, the man-eating alligator, is down with locomotor ataxia. Or that Damon, the grizzly, has just finished his brother Pythias in the tenth round, chewing off his tail, nose and remaining ear.

Science, of course, has its uses for the lower animals. A diligent study of their livers and lights helps to an understanding of the anatomy and physiology, and particularly of the pathology, of man. They are necessary aids in devising and manufacturing many remedial agents, and in testing the virtues of those already devised; out of the mute agonies of a rabbit or a calf may come relief for a baby with diphtheria, or means for an archdeacon to escape the consequences of his youthful follies. Moreover, something valuable is to be got out of a mere study of their habits, instincts and ways of mind—knowledge that, by analogy, may illuminate the parallel doings of the genus homo, and so enable us to comprehend the primitive mental processes of Congressmen, morons and the rev. clergy.

But it must be obvious that none of these studies can be made in a zoo. The zoo animals, to begin with, provide no material for the biologist; he can find out no more about their insides than what he discerns from a safe distance and through the bars. He is not allowed to try his germs and specifics upon them; he is not allowed to vivisect them. If he would find out what goes on in the animal body under this condition or that, he must turn from the inhabitants of the zoo to the customary guinea pigs and street dogs, and buy or steal them for himself. Nor does he get any chance for profitable inquiry when zoo animals die (usually of lack of exercise or ignorant doctoring), for their carcasses are not handed to him for autopsy, but at once stuffed with gypsum and excelsior and placed in some museum.

Least of all do zoos produce any new knowledge about animal behavior. Such knowledge must be got, not from animals penned up and tortured, but from animals in a state of nature. A college professor studying the habits of the giraffe, for example, and confining his observations to specimens in zoos, would inevitably come to the conclusion that the giraffe is a sedentary and melancholy beast, standing immovable for hours at a time and employing an Italian to feed him hay and cabbages. As well proceed to a study of the psychology of a juris-consult by first immersing him in Sing Sing, or of a juggler by first cutting off his hands. Knowledge so gained is inaccurate and imbecile knowledge. Not even a college professor, if sober, would give it any faith and credit.

There remains, then, the only true utility of a zoo: it is a childish and pointless show for the unintelligent, in brief, for children, nursemaids, visiting yokels and the generality of the defective. Should the taxpayers be forced to sweat millions for such a purpose? I think not. The sort of man who likes to spend his time watching a cage of monkeys chase one another, or a lion gnaw its tail, or a lizard catch flies, is precisely the sort of man whose mental weakness should be combatted at the public expense, and not fostered. He is a public liability and a public menace, and society should seek to improve him. Instead of that, we spend a lot of money to feed his degrading appetite and further paralyze his mind. It is precisely as if the community provided free champagne for dipsomaniacs, or hired lecturers to convert the army to the doctrines of the Bolsheviki.

Of the abominable cruelties practised in zoos it is unnecessary to make mention. Even assuming that all the keepers are men of delicate natures and ardent zoophiles (which is about as safe as assuming that the keepers of a prison are all sentimentalists, and weep for the sorrows of their charges), it must be plain that the work they do involves an endless war upon the native instincts of the animals, and that they must thus inflict the most abominable tortures every day. What could be a sadder sight than a tiger in a cage, save it be a forest monkey climbing dispairingly up a barked stump, or an eagle chained to its roost? How can man be benefitted and made better by robbing the seal of its arctic ice, the hippopotamus of its soft wallow, the buffalo of its open range, the lion of its kingship, the birds of their air?

I am no sentimentalist, God knows. I am in favor of vivisection unrestrained, so long as the vivisectionist knows what he is about. I advocate clubbing a dog that barks unnecessarily, which all dogs do. I enjoy hangings, particularly of converts to the evangelical faiths. The crunch of a cockroach is music to my ears. But when the day comes to turn the prisoners of the zoo out of their cages, if it is only to lead them to the swifter, kinder knife of the schochet, I shall be present and rejoicing, and if any one present thinks to suggest that it would be a good plan to celebrate the day by shooting the whole zoo faculty, I shall have a revolver in my pocket and a sound eye in my head.