came in to me from it was acrid with the reek of blood. There was
no sport in what was going forward: as I said, it was mere killing,
and the sight disgusted me. I am no prude about this matter. Give
a prisoner his weapons, put him in a pit with beasts of reasonable
strength, and let him fight to a finish if you choose, and I can
look on there and applaud the strokes. The war prisoner, being a
prisoner, has earned death by natural law, and prefers to get his
last stroke in hot blood than to be knocked down by the headsman's
axe. And it is any brave man's luxury either to help or watch a
lusty fight. But this baiting in the circus between the gates was
no fair battle like that.

To begin with, the beasts were no fair antagonists for single
men. In fact, twenty men armed might well have fled from them.
When the warder said tigers, I supposed he meant the great cats of
the woods. But here, in the circus, I saw a pair of the most
terrific of all the fur-bearing land beasts, the great tigers of
the caves--huge monsters, of such ponderous strength that in hunger
they will oftentimes drag down a mammoth, if they can find him away
from his herd.

How they had been brought captive I could not tell. Hunter of
beasts though I had been for all my days, I take no shame in saying
that I always approached the slaying of a cave-tiger with
stratagem and infinite caution. To entrap it alive and bring it
to a city on a chain was beyond my most daring schemes, and I have
been accredited with more new things than one. But here it was in
fact, and I saw in these captive beasts a new certificate for
Phorenice's genius.