high favor. Girls flung back light words at them, or tapped them on the
arm in passing. Two girls pinned roses on the coats of two of them, who
took it all as though they were used to it. 'Big leaguers of some kind,'
thinks Cogan, and asked the fruit-stand keeper who they were, and the
fruit-seller said 'Torero.'

"'Torero? Torero?--Ah-h-h'--Cogan recalled his 'Spanish Without A
Master'--'Ah-h-h, of course, Toreros--Toreadors'--he remembered the
opera 'Carmen'--bull-fighters. Cogan got up and followed them.

"If Cogan had never seen a bull-ring, he would right away have known
this in Lima for one. It was a perfect circle, about two hundred feet
across, packed with what looked like hard sand and surrounded by a stout
stockade, and with seats enough for eight or ten thousand people. The
bull-fighters had not minded when he followed them in, and now he took a
seat on the empty benches and watched them at practice. They had a bull,
a lively one, but a well trained one, too, for when he knocked one of
them over he would stand still and not try to trample anybody. He would
reach down and prod with his horns, but, as he had a brass knob on each
horn, he couldn't hurt them much that way. The fellows with the red
capes practised all their tricks, the men with wooden stakes all covered
with paper streamers practised theirs, and Cogan's blood was racing in
his veins before they were through. These were great athletes--he saw
that at once--and with a savage bull with sharp-pointed hoofs and horns
in place of that trained manicured one--well, these men would be taking
chances which no athlete at home ever had to take, unless they were
aerial-bar men in the circus or loop-the-loopers or something like that.

"A few of these men, as Cogan looked on, stood out from the others; and
after a time from among those few stood one by himself. From the first