lboy shrugged his shoulders and went home, to be made
a great fuss over by his mother and sisters, which he thought absurd;
but he liked the quiet look of pleasure his father gave him when he came
in after hearing the news in the town, though he only said, 'Good
business, my son!'

And although he is very shy of showing them, I think Dick is rather
proud of his two medals: one of the country where the courageous act was
performed, and that other of dull bronze which the Royal Humane Society
presents to England's brave sons and daughters.

Dick thought it took far more courage to walk up and receive this medal
amidst the cheers of the boys and their gay company on Prize-day, than
it did to jump in to the rescue of the boy in the Black Sea.

ANIMAL MAKESHIFTS.

True Anecdotes.

I.--INSTEAD OF A HAND.

[Illustration: "The elephant uses his nose as a hand."]

The wonderful contrivances by which animals manage to do beautiful work
without tools, to walk without feet, to fly without wings, to talk
without a voice, and to make their wants known not only to each other
but to their human friends, without understanding or speaking human
words, would fill a large book. No creature boasts of a hand like our
own; even that of the monkey, though his fingers resemble man's, has a
thumb which is nearly useless. The American spider-monkeys prefer to use
their long tails as hands, plucking fruits with the tips and carrying
them to their mouths. The elephant uses his nose as a hand (for his
trunk is nothing else but a long nose), and with this makeshift hand he
can pick up either a heavy cannon or a sixpence from the ground. The
horse uses his tail as a hand to drive off flies which he cannot
otherwise reach. On board ship a hen was once seen to use her neck as a
hand. She and the other fowls used to quarrel over the laying-boxes, and
though the nests looked all alike to a human eye, this hen coveted one
special box, and would lay nowhere else. One day her master took the
china nest-egg out of the box and put it into another one, to see what
she would do. He watched her through the chink of a door, and saw her
hunt till she found the egg, curl her neck round it like a big finger,
lift it thus, and carry it back to the old box, where she sat on it in
triumph.

Stories of rats who have been seen to carry off eggs, embracing them by
their tails, are common enough, and everybody has watched animals of
different kinds using t