e for, there it was
bobbing about on the surface, and he had to down it again and hold it
under till life seemed extinct. At last he gave it up and left it
floating in triumph, but one could infer with what perseverance he would
renew the struggle presently.

There might have been too many bears; but this was the fault of all
their fellow-captives except perhaps the elephants. One cannot really
have enough of elephants; and one would have liked a whole herd of
giraffes, and a whole troop of gnus would not have glutted one's
pleasure in their goat-faces, cow-heads, horse-tails, and pig-feet. But
why so many snakes of a kind? Why such a multiplicity of crocodiles? Why
even more than one of that special pattern of Mexican iguana which
looked as if cut out of zinc and painted a dull Paris green? Why, above
all, so many small mammals?

Small mammals was the favorite phrase of the friendly colored chairman,
who by this time had appeared with an old-soldier comrade and was
pushing the companions about from house to house and cage to cage. Small
mammals, he warned them, were of an offensive odor, and he was right;
but he was proud of them and of such scientific knowledge of them as he
had. The old soldier did not pretend to have any such knowledge. He fell
into a natural subordination, and let his colored superior lead the way
mostly, though he asserted the principle that this is a white man's
country by pushing first to the lions' house instead of going to the
flying-cage, as his dark comrade instructed him.

It was his sole revolt. "But what," we hear the reader asking, "is the
flying-cage?" We have not come to that yet; we are lingering still at
the lions' house, where two of the most amiable lions in the world
smilingly illustrate the effect of civilization in such of their savage
species as are born in the genial captivity of Bronx Park. We are
staying a moment in the cool stone stable of the elephants and the
rhinoceroses and the hippopotamuses; we are fondly clinging to the wires
of the cages where the hermit-thrushes, snatched from their loved
solitude and mixed with an indiscriminate company of bolder birds, tune
their angelic notes only in a tentative staccato; we are standing rapt
before the awful bell-bird ringing his sharp, unchanging, unceasing
peal, as unconscious of us as if he had us in the heart of his tropical
forest; we are waiting for the mighty blue Brazilian macaw to catch our
names and syllable them t