214 WILD LIFE UNDER THE EQUATOR. 
to look at it with great fondness. I was disarmed; I 
could not possibly fire. I seemed spell-bound, and could 
not raise my gun to fire. Yes, there was something too 
human in that female and her offspring; it hung by her 
breast, but, unlike our babies, who have to be entirely sup- 
ported, its little hands clutched its mother’s shoulders 
and helped it to support itself. The little fellow gave a 
shrill and plaintive ery, and crawled from its mother’s 
arms to her breast to be fed, and the mother lowered her 
head and looked at her offspring, and with his little fin- 
gers‘he pressed. and pressed her breast, so that the milk 
could come more freely. 
On a sudden the mother gave a tremendous cry, and 
before I knew it she had disappeared through the forest. 
I would not have missed this scene for a great deal, 
and I wish that you had all been with me to see it, for I 
know that perhaps such scenes may never be sgen again 
by a civilized man; I knew that it had never been seen 
before. The gorilla will one day disappear. A day will 
come when he who writes these pages will have been long 
dead and forgotten, but perhaps the record of what he 
has seen may, like the record of Hanno, fall into the 
hands of some one, and it will be read like a strange 
tale. 
I have eae away, altogether, thirty-one gorilla 
skins and skeletons; I have captured more than a dozen 
live gorillas, young ones, of course, and, altogether, I 
must have seen at different times ae my twelve 
years’ explorations more than three hundred of them. 
