Official supper.
Bilious face and boiled eye.
with the supper in the circumstances is a matter of speculation, but none is ever left over for breakfast. More sadness, too, one might look for on the morning after a Bank Holiday, in the bilious and dissipated face, the boiled eye, of Jung Perchad, greatest of all the takers of the cake. But the bilious face, the boiled eye, is not there. No elephant has a liver. Anatomists may profess to have discovered a liver in a dead elephant, but that is only said to astonish the ignorant. Proof plain is there that no living elephant is so afflicted. Nobody with a liver may light-heartedly eat pencils and pocketcombs and purses and plum-cake as does an elephant. Suffa Culli has swallowed a purse with six guineas in it, gaining less discomfort by the transaction than the owner, who had to walk home. The lamented Jumbo once purloined and swallowed a box of blister ointment from the pocket of a veterinary surgeon. with perfect impunity; anybody who has lunched off blister ointment might well spend the few remaining minutes of his life in admiration for Jumbo's digestive works. So that the excesses of Bank Holiday never leave any seeds of subsequent discomfort with either Jung Perchad, Suffa Culli, Jingo, or Solomon. Staggering outside a mammoth load of everything, either may lean pantingly against a tree for a few minutes—you may see their favourite tree between the elephant and parrot houses, forced from the perpendicular and bare of bark—but to-morrow he will be equal to beginning again.
Outside a load of everything.
In the bad weather, when few visitors come, the elephants are kept indoors. This is as well, upon the whole. If they were all let loose, with very few people about the grounds, awkward things might happen. In the summer, and especially on Bank Holidays, there are quite as many offers of refreshment as can easily be attended to, and the elephantine belief that the entire outside world is intended to be eaten does not get free play. An unfortunate country visitor meeting several elephants at once after a long estrangement from buns, might have disconcerting adventures. His pockets would certainly be rifled and his umbrella eaten, at once; also his hat. I am not quite
