d India carrying logs, and at
Coney Island he bends the knee to little girls from Brooklyn. The
royal proboscis, that once uprooted trees, now begs for peanuts.

But, you never see a hippopotamus chained to a road-roller, or
riding a bicycle. He is still the gentleman, the man of elegant
leisure, the aristocrat of aristocrats, harming no one, and, in his
ancestral river, living the simple life.

And yet, I sought to kill him. At least, one of him, but only one.
And, that I did not kill even one, while a bitter disappointment, is
still a source of satisfaction.

In the Congo River we saw only two hippos, and both of them were
dead. They had been shot from a steamer. If the hippo is killed in
the water, it is impossible to recover the body at once. It sinks
and does not rise, some say, for an hour, others say for seven
hours. As in an hour the current may have carried the body four
miles below where it sank, the steamer does not wait, and the
destruction of the big beast is simple murder. There should be a law
in the Congo to prevent their destruction, and, no doubt, if the
State thought it could make a few francs out of protecting the
hippo, as it makes many million francs by preserving the elephant,
which it does for the ivory, such a law would exist. We soon saw
many hippos, but although we could not persuade the only other
passenger not to fire at them, there are a few hippos still alive in
the Congo. For, the only time the Captain and I were positive he
hit anything, was when he fired over our heads and blew off the roof
of the bridge.

When first we saw the two dead hippos, one of them was turning and
twisting so violently that we thought he was alive. But, as we drew
near, we saw the strange convulsions were due to two enormous and
ugly crocodiles, who were fiercely pulling at the body. Crocodiles
being man-eaters, we had no feelings about shooting them, either in
the water or up a tree; and I hope we hit them. In any event, after
we fired the body drifted on in peace.

On my return trip, going with the stream, when the boat covers about
four times the distance she makes when steaming against it, I saw
many hippos. In one day I counted sixty-nine. But on our way up the
Congo, until we turned into the Kasai River, we saw none.

So, on the first night we camped in the Kasai I had begun to think I
never would see one, and I went ashore both skeptical and
discouraged. We had stopped, not at a wood post, but at