ddressed
as _Nasua nasua nasua_--which lays itself open to the twin ambiguity
of stuttering Latin, or the echoes of a Princetonian football yell.
The natural histories call him coati-mundi, while the Indian has by
far the best of it, with the ringing, climactic syllables, _Kibihee!_
And so, in the case of a being who has received much more than his
share of vitality, it was altogether fitting to shorten this to
Kib--Dunsany's giver of life upon the earth.

My heart's desire is to run on and tell many paragraphs of Kib; but
that, as I have said, would be bad taste, which is one form of
immorality. For in such things sentiment runs too closely parallel to
sentimentality,--moderation becomes maudlinism,--and one enters the
caste of those who tell anecdotes of children, and the latest symptoms
of their physical ills. And the deeper one feels the joys of
friendship with individual small folk of the jungle, the more
difficult it is to convey them to others. And so it is not of the
tropical mammal coati-mundi, nor even of the humorous Kib that I
think, but of the soul of him galloping up and down his slanting log,
of his little inner ego, which changed from a wild thing to one who
would hurl himself from any height or distance into a lap, confident
that we would save his neck, welcome him, and waste good time playing
the game which he invented, of seeing whether we could touch his
little cold snout before he hid it beneath his curved arms.

So, in spite of my resolves, our bamboo groves became the homes of
numerous little souls of wild folk, whose individuality shone out and
dominated the less important incidental casement, whether it happened
to be feathers, or fur, or scales. It is interesting to observe how
the Adam in one comes to the surface in the matter of names for pets.
I know exactly the uncomfortable feeling which must have perturbed the
heart of that pioneer of nomenclaturists, to be plumped down in the
midst of "the greatest aggregation of animals ever assembled" before
the time of Noah, and to be able to speak of them only as _this_ or
_that_, _he_ or _she_. So we felt when inundated by a host of pets. It
is easy to speak of the species by the lawful Latin or Greek name; we
mention the specimen on our laboratory table by its common
natural-history appellation. But the individual who touches our pity,
or concern, or affection, demands a special title--usually absurdly
inapt.

Soon, in the bamboo glade about ou