top of the pump; the elephant
knocked out a side of the barn, to see what was the matter; all the
wives ran for the houses, and there was a general confusion. A leopard
seized a young chicken. Mrs. Dyer came out with a rolling-pin in her
hand. Tim and Tom Stubbs declared they would catch the animals, if
Jedidiah would only find something safe to put them in.

"If we only had a cave!" exclaimed Lucy Miles, who had hidden behind the
kitchen door.

Tim and Tom Stubbs caught one of the tigers, just as Jedidiah appeared
with his mother's bandbox. He had thrown his mother's caps and her
Sunday bonnet on the spare-room floor. They shut the tiger up in the
bandbox, then found one of the bears climbing up the pump after Noah.
Jedidiah brought a strong string, and tied him to a post. All the rest
of the boys ran away at first, but ventured to come back and join in the
search for the rest of the beasts.

The hunt grew quite exciting. One of the boys, who had read African
travels, prepared a leash of twine, and made a lasso, and with this he
succeeded in catching the two hyenas. Then no one knew if all the beasts
were caught or no. The boy who had read the travels could tell a long
list of wild animals that ought to be in the ark. There was the
rhinoceros, the hippopotamus, the jaguar; there was the leopard, the
panther, the ocelot. Mrs. Dyer put her hands up to her ears in dismay.
She could not bear to hear any more of their names; and to think she
might meet them any day, coming in at the wood-house door, or running
off with one of the chickens!

But the Stubbses thought very likely all these animals never were in
this ark at all, though they might have been in the original Noah's Ark.
This was only a play ark, after all, and you could not expect to find
every animal in it. The minister's wife said she did not know what you
should expect. The ark was quite a different one from any she had seen.
She had bought them for her children, year in and year out, and she had
never seen anything of the sort. You might expect a hippopotamus, or any
kind of beast. Those she had bought were always of wood, and the legs
broke off easily. You could mend them with Spalding's Glue; but even
Spalding was not as good as it used to be, and you could not depend
upon it.

Meanwhile the hunt went on. The Spinville people began to be sorry they
had ever bought a Noah's Ark. They had expected nothing of the sort. At
last the two leopards were found,