that uncertain light. They fed in a semicircle,
gradually drawing round towards the hut near my tree, in which the corn
was stored and the old woman slept.

"This went on for between an hour and an hour and a half, till, what
between excitement and hope, that maketh the heart sick, I grew so
weary that I was actually contemplating a descent from the tree and a
moonlight stalk. Such an act in ground so open would have been that of a
stark staring lunatic, and that I should even have been contemplating it
will show you the condition of my mind. But everything comes to him who
knows how to wait, and sometimes too to him who doesn't, and so at last
those elephants, or rather one of them, came to me.

"After they had fed their fill, which was a very large one, the noble
three stood once more in line some seventy yards to the left of the hut,
and on the edge of the cultivated lands, or in all about eighty-five
yards from where I was perched. Then at last the one with a single tusk
made a peculiar rattling noise in his trunk, just as though he were
blowing his nose, and without more ado began to walk deliberately toward
the hut where the old woman slept. I made my rifle ready and glanced up
at the moon, only to discover that a new complication was looming in the
immediate future. I have said that a wind rose with the moon. Well, the
wind brought rain-clouds along its track. Several light ones had already
lessened the light for a little while, though without obscuring it, and
now two more were coming up rapidly, both of them very black and dense.
The first cloud was small and long, and the one behind big and broad. I
remember noticing that the pair of them bore a most comical resemblance
to a dray drawn by a very long raw-boned horse. As luck would have it,
just as the elephant arrived within twenty-five yards or so of me, the
head of the horse-cloud floated over the face of the moon, rendering
it impossible for me to fire. In the faint twilight which remained,
however, I could just make out the gray mass of the great brute still
advancing towards the hut. Then the light went altogether and I had to
trust to my ears. I heard him fumbling with his trunk, apparently at the
roof of the hut; next came a sound as of straw being drawn out, and then
for a little while there was complete silence.

"The cloud began to pass; I could see the outline of the elephant; he
was standing with his head quite over the top of the hut. But I could