CHAPTER XXIV.
THE GREAT MOGUL.
One evening, Tom Fool, and a groom, his particular friend, were taking their pastime after a somewhat selfish fashion, by no means newly discovered in the castle--that of teasing the wild beasts.

There was one in particular, a panther, which, in a special dislike to grimaces, had discovered a special capacity for being teased.

Betwixt two of the bars of his cage, therefore, Tom was busy presenting him with one hideous puritanical face after another, in full expectation of a satisfactory outburst of feline rancour.

But to their disappointment, the panther on this occasion seemed to have resolved upon a dignified resistance to temptation, and had withdrawn in sultry displeasure to the back of his cage, where he lay sideways, deigning to turn neither his back nor his face towards the inferior animal, at whom to cast but one glance, he knew, would be to ruin his grand Oriental sulks, and fly at the hideous ape-visage insulting him in his prison.

It was tiresome of the brute.
Tom Fool grew more daring and threw little stones at him, but the panther seemed only to grow the more imperturbable, and to heed his missiles as little as his grimaces.
At length, proceeding from bad to worse, as is always the way with fools, born or made, Tom betook himself to stronger measures.
The cages of the wild beasts were in the basement of the kitchen tower, with a little semicircular yard of their own before them.