The squirter.
for a benefit—usually expressing the facts by squirting water over somebody—all those charming stories I may still turn to for comfort amid the tribulations of this world, with confidence that even it they are not all strictly true, they are at least reasonable lies. I look back with much affection upon the virtuously-squirting elephant. The squirtee most clearly to be remembered is the bad, tailor who pricked the elephant's trunk. The squirter was, I believe, the first elephant whose acquaintance I made. I certainly knew him long before I knew that other virtuous elephant who broke a man's head with a cocoanut, to compensate the man for breaking a cocoanut with his head. I almost think I knew him before I first met the Noah's Ark elephant. The Noah's Ark elephant was my most confidential playmate, and tasted rather of garden-mould till the paint came off when he lost his grittiness
The Noah's Ark Elephant.
and became a pig, having broken his trunk. He was not very broad in the back, it is true, having been made of a flat piece of wood, but he was very interesting animal before he was a pig. I was much more intimate with him than with Noah, who was a little stiff, not to say stuck-up. As a pig his career ended suddenly in a memorable maritime disaster—when a vessel in my ownership, chartered at the time as a cattle-boat, foundered in the duck pond with most of the farmyard and a good deal of the ark.
The Circus Elephant.
It was while the Noah's Ark elephant was a pig that I first saw the circus elephant. He was not altogether a fair specimen. He was rude. He rang an immense railway bell for his dinner, and when he had finished one course, swept everything off the table with his foot. None of the elephants in this place would behave like that. Even Jingo and Solomon, who are young—mere boys—know better than that, and take buns and apples most respectfully. The circus elephant, too, played low practical jokes with the clown, and danced on a tub at a fatal sacrifice of dignity.
Mandevile's Olifaunt.
In Sir John Maundevile I still have a dear friend among what that charming old truth-monger called the "olifaunts." He has curly tusks and a bushy tail, and carries a very tall castle on his back, with mighty battlements. He is more startling even than our old friend of the Surrey side, once igno-
