e takes his
flight, and the canoes, now in the water, follow. When the brute comes
up again, he is received with a shower of javelins, and dives again,
leaving a blood-red streak behind him. He may be irritated when he is
attacked time after time by spears, and it may happen that he turns on
his persecutors and crushes a too venturesome canoe with his great
tusks, or gives it a blow underneath with his head. Sometimes the animal
is not content with the canoes, but attacks the men, and many too daring
hunters have lost their lives in this way. When the hippopotamus has
been sufficiently tired out, the hunters pick up the float, and take
the line ashore to wind it round a tree, and then they pull with all
their might to draw the creature up out of the water.

The flesh is eaten everywhere, especially that of the young animals, and
the tongue and the fat of the older ones are considered delicacies.
Riding-whips, shields, and many other articles are made out of the hide,
and the large tusks are valuable. Hippopotami may be seen in some of the
zoological gardens in Europe, but they do not thrive well in the care of
man.

MAN-EATING LIONS

A terrible tale of man-eating lions is told by Colonel Patterson in his
book _The Man-Eaters of Tsavo_.

Colonel Patterson had been ordered for service on the Uganda Railway,
which runs from Mombasa north-westwards through British East Africa to
the great lake Victoria Nyanza, the largest source-lake of the Nile. But
in 1898, when the Colonel arrived, the railway had not been carried
farther than the Tsavo, a tributary of the Sabaki, which enters the sea
north of Mombasa. Here at Tsavo (see map, p. 237) the Colonel had his
headquarters, and in the neighbourhood were camped some thousands of
railway coolies from India. A temporary wooden bridge crossed the Tsavo,
and the Colonel was to build a permanent iron bridge over the river, and
had besides the supervision of the railway works for thirty miles in
each direction.

Some days after his arrival at Tsavo the Colonel heard of two lions
which made the country unsafe. He paid little heed to these reports
until a couple of weeks later, when one of his own servants was carried
off by a lion. A comrade, who had a bed in the same tent, had seen the
lion steal noiselessly into the camp in the middle of the night, go
straight to the tent, and seize the man by the throat. The poor fellow
cried out "Let go," and threw his arms round the beast'