The other menageries were penny shows. One was Ballard's, of which the great attraction was still, though nine years had elapsed since the event, the lioness which attacked the Exeter mail-coach. The collection contained besides a fine lion, a tiger, a large polar bear, and several smaller quadrupeds, monkeys, and birds. Hone has not preserved the name of the owner of the fourth collection, which he says was "a really good exhibition of a fine lion, with leopards, and various other beasts of the forest. They were mostly docile and in good condition. One of the leopards was carried by his keeper a pick-a-back." This was probably Morgan's, which we find at this fair three years later.
The daily cost of the food of the animals in a menagerie is no trifle. The amount of animal food required for the carnivora in a first class menagerie is about four hundredweight daily, consisting chiefly of the shins, hearts, and heads of bullocks. A full-grown lion or tiger will consume twelve pounds of meat per day, and this is said to have been the allowance in Wombwell's menagerie; but it is more, I believe, than is allowed in the gardens of the Zoological Society. Bears are allowed meat only in the winter, their food at other seasons consisting of bread, sopped biscuit, or boiled rice, sweetened with sugar. Then there are the elephants, camels, antelopes, etc., to be provided for; and the quantity of hay, cabbages, bread, and boiled rice which an elephant will consume, in addition to the buns and biscuits given to it by the visitors, is, as Dominie Sampson would say, prodigious. There is a story told of an elephant belonging to a travelling menagerie which escaped from the stable in which it had been placed for the night, and, wandering through the village, found a baker's shop open. It pushed its head in, and, helping itself with its trunk, devoured sixteen four-pound loaves, and was beginning to empty the glass jars of the sweets they contained when the arrival of its keeper interrupted its stolen repast.
I now come to the minor exhibitions, of which the first from Hosier Lane, where it stood at the corner, was a peep-show, in which rudely painted pictures were successively lowered by the showmen, and viewed through circular apertures, fitted with glasses of magnifying power. A green curtain separated the spectators from the outer throng while they gazed upon such strangely contrasted scenes as the murder of Weare and the Queen of Sheba's visit to Solomon, the execution of Probert and the conversion of St. Paul, the Greenland whale fishery and the building of Babel, Wellington at Waterloo and Daniel in the lions' den!