Nelly v. Wallace

British mystics were deep in thought last week, wondering whether they had found a symbolism between an occurrence at Dorsetshire and the ancient story of the lion and the unicorn. The occurrence: In a fair field of turnips near Lyme Regis* grazed Nelly, a young mother cow. Suddenly came the frightened blat of Nelly's day-old calf. There in the field was a tawny, muscular black-maned lion.

The lion, whose name was Wallace, was not looking for the calf or Nelly. He was simply anxious to preserve a new freedom he had found when the menagerie truck in which he, a $2,500 show lion, had been riding was wrecked in a road smash. While the wreck was being untangled, Wallace had trotted down the road and lain down, blinking at the Dorset sun, rolling now and then in the Dorset dust. When his keeper approached, over a hedge had leaped Wallace and brought up in puzzlement before Nelly's calf.

Tail stiffening like a hoe handle, brown eyes rolling madly, Nelly charged on Wallace, gored him deeply. At the same time showers of buckshot from the guns of shouting farmers added to Wallace's misery, roused his temper. Quickly he raked Nelly's ribs, broke her neck, left her to die, loped across the pasture into a cottage garden. There the Lyme Regis postman, armed with a revolver, stalked the lion through the hollyhocks, shot him dead.

*The King's Lyme, commemorating Peter Baudrat's gift of lands in Lyme Borough to King Edward II in the 14th century. Last week Bognor, seaside town in Sussex, where King George V was recently a convalescent, became with George V's permission, Bognor Regis.