military Bob, in that vile nose-cage—but there! He turns his head the other way, and tries to look as though he hated buns. He tries not to see them, but they glisten, gloriously brown and sticky, from all sides—somehow there are always more buns about when that muzzle is on. And Bob becomes a greater misanthrope than is natural to him; which, speaking of a camel, is saying much. But what living thing in all these Gardens could spend half its waking hours in painfully assuming a contempt for buns without becoming a misanthrope?
"Mr. Self in?"
Rose, who is cross-bred, is, in sheer spite of the hint the word carries, rather an amiable creature, and very rarely cross—for a camel. There has even been no necessity to give her a nose-ring. She is not always of an industrious appearance, having a habit of lying about in an Orientally lazy heap—so Oriental a heap that one instinctively looks for the hookah which Rose ought, in the circumstances, to be smoking.
The local flies try a little annoyance now and again, but they have learned a great respect for a camel's length of reach. I remember a country bluebottle—a very raw and self-confident country bluebottle—who made a rash onslaught upon Rose without proper consideration. I knew this fly—I had met him once before, when he madly attempted to burgle a tin picnic box containing nothing.
I felt interested to observe how he would get on with Rose, knowing well that, without asking advice of any regular local bluebottle, he would assume her to be a mere scraggy town cow. This is just what he did. Rose stood, looking perfectly amiable—all camels look amiable; it is a part of their system—and, to an unaccustomed eye, quite unconscious of the country bluebottle's existence. Still, there was a certain optical twinkle which should have warned that bluebottle. But, heedless all, he rushed forward and made to settle on Rose's shoulder. With a nonchalant swing the near hind leg came up, and that bluebottle was brushed off his legs. He buzzed about for a little while, puzzled. This was quite a new motion in cow-legs—some town improvement, evidently. So he settled—at least he tried—near the top joint of that hind-leg, where the foot couldn't reach him. Rose looked calmly ahead at nothing, and moved no limb but the near fore-leg, which swung quietly back, and—that bluebottle was projected into space at the instant his feet were landing.
He gathered himself together, and sat on the roof of the stable to think it over. Meanwhile Rose stood at ease, without a further movement. The bluebottle considered the question strategically, and made up his mind that on the chest, just before the joints of the fore-legs, nothing could touch him. He tried it. But he only arrived on the spot simultaneously with a hind-foot, which swung neatly out between the fore-legs and drove that bluebottle into the surrounding atmosphere once more. And still Rose gazed amiably at nothing.
Losing his temper he made straight for her nose; but the nose never moved. The hind leg came up once more, however, and made the rout complete. Baffled and disgusted, the rash bluebottle flew off in a pet, over the rails dividing Rose from
