was Athens? at the most, a second-class town; and yet in history
both appear to us as enormous cities. This is a sample of what the
sun can do.

Are you going to be astonished after this that the same sun falling
upon Tarascon should have made of an ex-captain in the Army
Clothing Factory, like Bravida, the "brave commandant;" of a
sprout an Indian fig-tree; and of a man who had missed going to
Shanghai one who had been there?



VIII.
Mitaine's Menagerie -- A Lion from the Atlas at
Tarascon -- A Solemn and Fearsome Confrontation.


EXHIBITING Tartarin of Tarascon, as we are, in his private life,
before Fame kissed his brow and garlanded him with her well-worn
laurel wreath, and having narrated his heroic existence in a modest
state, his delights and sorrows, his dreams and his hopes, let us
hurriedly skip to the grandest pages of his story, and to the singular
event which was to give the first flight to his incomparable career.

It happened one evening at Costecalde the gunmaker's, where
Tartarin was engaged in showing several sportsmen the working of
the needle-gun, then in its first novelty. The door suddenly flew
open, and in rushed a bewildered cap-popper, howling "A lion, a
lion!" General was the alarm, stupor, uproar and tumult. Tartarin
prepared to resist cavalry with the bayonet, whilst Costecalde ran to