re as a rule,' said the African.

'Yes, yes, I can't grumble; they are very good to me, and I get some
exercise walking about, and as some day I shall grow old, it's as well,
perhaps, to be looked after. It's terrible to be old when one lives in
the forest; besides, I should feel strange to go back to the old life.
I've been here now thirty years.'

'And I twenty. How time does go past!'

All this and much more you might hear if you knew the elephants'
language, for they are quite too clever not to have some means of
talking to each other.

The rhinoceros is very different. His eyes are wicked, he turns his head
from side to side; he would like to stick that horn at the end of his
nose into you if he could, and, holding you down with his great flat
feet, rummage about inside you with it, and you would not live very long
under that treatment. His skin hangs in great thick folds like plates of
armour, and is so loose that it looks as if his tailor had fitted him
very badly. He is much smaller than the elephant, and his thick-set body
shows great strength. He is hideously ugly according to our ideas; but
rhinoceros' ideas are different, and he would probably think the smooth
pink-and-white skin of a child hideous. He lives in the jungle and eats
the leaves of trees, which he tears off with his long upper lip. Some
rhinoceroses have two horns on their nose and some only one. You can
see both sorts in the Gardens. When the rhinoceros in its wild state has
a little calf, as its young one is called, the little one runs along in
front of the mother at the sound of any danger, and the mother follows
in a wallowing trot behind, so that if necessary her body could guard it
from danger. Sometimes hunters shoot rhinoceroses and kill them, and
then eat part of them, which they say is very good, just like beef.

After leaving the elephant and rhinoceros house, we pass some sheds and
yards, with deer and other animals, and then come to another set of
buildings like stables, where there are the hippopotami and giraffes. If
you thought the rhinoceros ugly, what will you think of the
hippopotamus, with his great shovel-like nose and little ears? He looks
like a stupid fat pig, only many, many times larger than the largest pig
that ever lived. There are two of these animals in the Gardens now--a
lady hippo, born at the Zoo, and about thirty years old, and another,
quite a boy yet, only ten or eleven years old, who was born in the
Zool