of King Ptush to our wild districts in search of a
fresh hunting-ground for himself and his son, Prince Ptutt, brought
about a very serious condition of affairs in respect to the mastodon,
or what some persons refer to as the Antediluvians. This most
distinguished personage, wearying of the affairs of state in his own
land, gave over the reins of government for a while to his Grand
Vizier, and on behalf of the Nimrodian Institution, a Museum of
Natural and Unnatural History in his own capital city, came hither to
study the fauna and flora of our district, and incidentally to take
back with him a variety of stuffed specimens of our more conspicuous
wild beasts for exhibition purposes. Entirely unaware of His Majesty's
unerring aim in hitting large surfaces at short range, we welcomed him
cordially to our midst, and rather unwisely presented him with the
freedom of the jungle, a ceremony which carried with it the privilege
of bagging anything he could hit with his slungshot, in season or out
of it. The results of His Majesty's visit were appalling, for he had
not been with us more than six weeks before his enthusiasm getting the
better of his sportsmanship he turned the jungle into a zoological
shambles, from which it is never likely to recover. On his first day's
outing, to our dismay he brought down thirty-seven ring-tailed
ornithorhyncusses, eighteen pterodactyls, three brace of dodo, and a
domesticated diplodocus, and then assured us that he didn't know what
could be the matter with his aim that he had missed so many. The next
day he rose early, and while the rest of his suite were sleeping went
out unattended, returning before breakfast was over with a tally-card
showing a killing of thirteen dinosaurs, twenty-seven megatheriums,
and about six tons of chlamy-dophori, not to mention a mammoth
jack-rabbit that some idiot had told him was the only specimen in the
world of the monodelphian mollycoddle. The situation became very
embarrassing to us because we were on excellent terms with King Ptush
and his subjects, and we did not wish to do anything to offend either
of them, but here was a case where in the interests of our own fauna
something had to be done. Going on at the rate in which he had begun
it was easy to see that unless somebody got out an injunction
restraining him from shooting between meals it would not be many days
before there wasn't a prehistoric beast left in the whole country. It
was a mighty ticklish