might have it.

[Illustration: THE FIRST THING WE SAW WERE TWO HUGE ELEPHANTS.]

CHAPTER XXV

JIM'S STORY

Joyce's a brick. She can do most things boys can, and we soon began
racing each other along those little raised bits of earth between the
beds in the paddy fields. I splashed right in once or twice and we
shrieked with laughter. By and by we found ourselves through that and
out on a flat place covered with thorns. They weren't very high mostly,
and we didn't feel them through our shoes, but now and again one caught
us on the ankles and then didn't we hop! By the time we had reached the
road I suppose we had lost sight of you altogether. I didn't think about
it. I just had a feeling we must scramble on in that fizzing red sunset
light, and then when we got tired turn plump round and go straight back
to the ship the same way. I didn't really think about it, though.

The road? Yes, it was a sort of a road, at least it was a clear space
marked all over with deep ruts and lined by little trees, and it ran
ever so far both ways, as Euclid says a line does. The first thing we
saw were two huge elephants, striding along with a wooden thing on the
neck of one, banging and rattling as his head went up and down. A man
was sitting on his neck and he took no notice of us at all, but
they--the elephants, I mean--just loped along in that swinging way they
do; I think it must make anyone sea-sick to be on their backs. We stared
at them till they got far away. Then I discovered that the little trees
were mimosa, which shrivel up when you touch them. They had dropped
seeds on the ground, I suppose, for under them were tiny little mimosas,
not trees but scrub stuff. Joyce had never seen any, and when I rubbed
my hand across them and she saw them wither up, she cried out, "What a
shame! Dear little things, don't be afraid of me!" and plumped herself
down beside them to cuddle them, but they withered more than ever. How
we laughed! The ones I had withered first were just beginning to come
right again, and I was going to make them shut up once more, and she had
caught my hand to stop me, when we heard a noise and looked up, and
there was a great buffalo coming right at us with his nose stuck up
straight in the air as if he smelt something nasty. You never saw
anything so comic! Joyce cried out, "Oh, what a darling!" But into my
head, quick as lightning, came what you told me about buffaloes, who
hate Europeans savagely, th