id it was all as nice as it could be, and they were still so content
in her and her baby that, when they had to drive out of the park to
cross a street to the section where the restaurant and the menagerie
were, they waited deferentially for a long, long funeral to get by. They
felt pity for the bereaved, and then admiration for people who could
afford to have so many carriages; and they made their driver ask the
mounted policeman whose funeral it was. He addressed the policeman by
name, and the companions felt included in the circle of an acquaintance
where a good deal of domesticity seemed to prevail. The policeman would
not join in the conjecture that it was some distinguished person; he did
not give his reasons; and the pair began to fret at their delay, and
mentally to hurry that poor unknown underground--so short is our
patience with the dead! When at last their driver went up round the
endless queue of hacks, it suddenly came to an end, and they were again
in the park and among the cages and pens and ranges of the animals, in
the midst of which their own restaurant appeared. An Italian band of
mandolins and guitars was already at noonday softly murmuring and
whimpering in the corner of the veranda where the tables were set; and
they got an amiable old waiter, whose fault it was not if spring-lamb
matures so early in the summer of its brief term as to seem
last-fall-lamb. There is no good reason either to suppose he did not
really believe in the pease. But why will pease that know they have been
the whole winter in the can pretend to be just out of the pod? Doubtless
it is for every implication that all vegetation is of one ichor with
humanity; but the waiter was honester than the pease. He telephoned for
two wheeled chairs, and then said he had countermanded them because
they would be half an hour coming; but again he telephoned, for by this
time the pair had learned that they might drive into the zoological
grounds, but not drive round them; and they saw from the window the sun
smoking hot on the asphalt paths their feet must press.

[Illustration: ZOOLOGICAL GARDENS, BRONX PARK]

While the chairs lingered on the way, they went to get what comfort they
could from the bears, whose house was near at hand. They might well have
learned patience here from a bear trying to cope with a mocking cask in
a pool. He pushed it under the water with his paw and held it hard down;
when he turned away as if _that_ cask were don