ANECDOTES OF ELEPHANTS. 677 



The English novelist, Mr. Charles Reade, holds the opinion of all 

 American showmen, that the elephant is only to be mastered by fear. 

 He writes : " There is a fixed opinion among men that an elephant is a 

 good, kind creature. The opinion is fed by the proprietors of elephants, 

 who must nurse the notion or lose their customers, and so a set tale is 

 always ready to clear the guilty and criminate the sufferer ; and this tale 

 is greedily swallowed by the public. You will hear and read many such 

 tales in the papers before you die. Every such tale is a lie." 



He then narrates the performances of a famous performing elephant, 

 Mademoiselle Djek. She killed several of her keepers, but seemed to be 

 devotedly attached to the most drunken and brutal of the lot. A com- 

 rade detected this keeper walking into her with a pitchfork, her trem- 

 bling like a school-boy, with her head in a corner, and the blood stream- 

 ing from her sides. The spectator next took an opportunity of trying 

 the efficacy of this mode of treatment. " I took the steel rod, and intro- 

 duced myself by driving it into Djek's ribs ; she took it as a matter of 

 course, and walked like a Iamb. We marched on, the best of friends. 

 About a mile out of the town she put out her trunk, and tried to curl it 

 round me in a caressing way. I met this overture by driving the steel, 

 into her till the blood squirted out of her. If 1 had not, the siren would 

 have killed me in the course of the next five minutes. 



" Whenever she relaxed her speed 1 drove the steel into her. When 

 the afternoon sun smiled gloriously on us, and the poor thing felt nature 

 stir in her heart, and began to frisk in her awful, clumsy way, pounding 

 the great globe, 1 drove the steel into her. If I had not, I should not be 

 here to relate this narrative." 



The fact that a creature can be cowed by cruelty is no proof that it 

 is not amenable to kindness. Casanova, the great dealer in wild animals, 

 bore witness how grateful the elephants he brought from Africa were to 

 the European keepers who treated them kindly, while they could not 

 bear the cruel natives. 



Buffon relates the following trait : " A painter wished to make a 

 drawing of the elephant of the menagerie of Versailles in an extraor- 

 dinary attitude, which was with its trunk elevated in the air, and it;, 

 mouth wide open. The painter's servant, to make it remain in this 

 attitude, kept throwing fruit into its mouth, but oftener, by pretending 

 to do so. The elephant, as if it knew that the painter's desire of making 

 a drawing of it was the cause of its being thus annoyed, instead of 



