the monkeys
all the liberty they could use and abuse; it was good sport to see them
chase themselves and each other over the masts and upper-works.

The most you can say of going out with a big tonnage of beasts is that,
if you're healthy and have no nerves, you can just stand it. Sometimes
they'll all howl together for five or six hours at a time; sometimes
they'll all be logy and still as death, except one tiger, who can't make
his wants understood and who'll whine and rumble about them all round
the clock. I don't know which is worse, the chorus or the solo. And
then, of course, the smell side to the situation isn't a matter for
print. If I say that we had twenty hogsheads of disinfectants and
deodorizers along it's all you need know. Anyhow, according to Yir
Massir, it was the smell that killed big Bahut's mate. And she'd been
brought up in an Indian village and ought to have been used to all the
smells, from A to Z.

One elephant more or less doesn't matter to me, especially when it's
insured, but Yir Massir's grief and self-reproach were appalling; and
Ivy felt badly too. It was as much for her sake as Yir Massir's that I
read a part of the burial service out of the prayer-book and committed
the body of "this our sister" to the deep. It may have been
sacrilegious, but I don't care. It comforted Ivy some and Yir Massir a
heap. And it did this to me, that I can't look at a beast now without
thinking that--well, that there's not such an awful lot of difference
between two legs and four, and that maybe God put Himself out just as
much to make one as the other.

We swung her overside by heavy tackle. What with the roll of the ship
and the fact that she swung feet down, she looked alive; and the funeral
looked more like a drowning than a burial.

We had no weights to sink her; and when I gave the word to cut loose she
made a splash like a small tidal wave and then floated.

We could see her for an hour, like a bit of a slate-colored island with
white gulls sitting on it.

And that night Yir Massir waited on us looking like some old crazy loon
out of the Bible. He'd made himself a prickly shirt of sackcloth and had
smeared his black head and brown face with gray ashes. Big Bahut
whimpered all night and trumpeted as if his heart were broken.

IV

I've often noticed that when things happen it's in bunches. The tenth
day south of the line we had a look at almost all the sea-events that
are made into woodcuts for