Sacramento daily record-union. [volume] (Sacramento [Calif.]) 1875-1891, 1885-11-14
SNAP, THE LION.

Not a great roaring lion, such as eat peo-
pie, but little bit of fellow, only a few
inches long, that couldn't possibly eat any
thing larger than fly, though he could
and did eat lots of them. He was not
really a lion at all. but chameleon-a kind
of small lizard, exactly like Bill the lizard,
in "Alice in Wonderland - but, as little
Bob, whose pet he was, called him cane
mellon, we all fell into the way of speak
ing of him as the lion.
He was sent to Bob from Florida in a
pasteboard box, and at first we disliked him
with the natural aversion that most people
have for all sorts of reptiles; but when we
found how interesting and harmless and
pretty he really was, our dislike began to
disappear, and byand-by we became quite
fond of him.
Small Bob thought more of his little
bit lion" than of all his other pets, includ-
ing his rabbit, put together.
The lion came to us one sunny day in
March, and we let him out of his box
among the plants that grow so beautifully
i'll the south baywindow. He was of a
dark reddish-brown color, and for long
time he remained perfectly quiet, almost
hidden under a begonia leaf.
He stayed there so long that we became
tired of waiting to see what he would do,
turned our attention to other things, say
ing that he was a stupid little beast, and
did not amount to much, any way.
Suddenly Bob cried;
Look ~
We looked, and saw that the lion had
turned a most beautiful shade of light
green.
This of itself was interesting. But it
was much more so to see that he was
creeping as stealthily as q cat after a bird
toward an early spring fly that was buzz
ing stupidity in one corner of a window
pane. Slowly moving one little paw at a
time, with his body fiattened close to the
shelf, our lion approached his prey.
With his bright eyes fixed intentlv upon
it, he crept in this way within few inches
of the unconscious fly. There he stopped,
drew up his hind legs, opened mouth, and
suddenly, like flash of green light, sprang
toward the window.
With snap the little jaws closed upon
the fly, and the lion began to eat him with
a hearty relish. The quick snap of his
jaws upon this occasion decided his name,
and from that day he was called Snap, the
Lion"
In very little while his cunning ways
had endeared him to us all, and we studied
his habits, as much from a desire to learn
how to please and make him happy, as
from curiosity.
We discovered that he would eat nothing
in the way of substantial food except what
was alive. He preferred flies to anything
else; but also ate spiders reaches and small
bugs of all kinds
Snap proved himself wise little lion,
one day, when Bob placed wasp, with one
wing so broken that it could not fly, on the
window ledge. AS soon as the lion saw it
he began to creep toward it with his usual
stealthy movements, and when he got close
to it he opened his mouth wide, as though
he intended to swallow it, big as it was
All at once he stopped, hesitated moment,
and then turned tail and scampered away
to his hiding place under the leaves He
had evidently been taught, and now re-
membered, that wasps are not good for
small lions.
Early one morning Bob came running
into the dining-room in state of great ex-
element, and declared that his lion had a
white blanket on. We went to see. and.
sure enough, the lions skin was all
wrinkled and white and pulled out, so that
it looked as if he were wrapped in q
blanket. As we watched him, he swelled
his body and twisted himself this way and
that, until the skin split the whole length
of his back. Then he began tearing it off
with his mouth and eating it. The result
was that in about three hours he had shed
and eaten every particle of his old skin,
and appeared in a brand-new coat of the
most brilliant green. We afterward dis
covered that he went through with this OPP
Grafton about once a month.-TGolden
DAYS.