108 THE MINDS AND MANNERS 



or to break steel beams, is amazing. His greatest feat con- 

 sisted in breaking squarely in two, by pushing with his head, a 

 90-pound steel railroad iron used as the top bar of his fence. 

 He knows the mechanism of the latch of the ponderous steel 

 door between his two box stalls, and nothing but a small pin 

 that only human fingers can manipulate suffices to thwart his 

 efforts to control the latch. 



Kartoum has gone over every inch of surface of his two 

 apartments, his doors, gates and fences, to find something that 

 he can break or damage. The steel linings of his apartment 

 walls, originally five feet high, we have been compelled to 

 extend upward to a height of nine feet, to save the brick walls 

 from being battered and disfigured. He has searched his steel 

 fences throughout, in order to find their weakest points, and 

 concentrate his attacks upon them. If the sharp-pointed iron 

 spikes three inches long that are set all over his doors are per- 

 fectly solid, he respects them, but if one is the least bit loose in 

 its socket, he works at it until he finally breaks it off. 



I invite any Doubting Thomas who thinks that Kartoum 

 does not "think" and "reason" to try his own thinking and 

 reasoning at inventing for Kartoum's door a latch that a keeper 

 can easily and surely open and close at a distance of ten feet, 

 and that will be Kartoum-proof . As for ourselves, three or four 

 seemingly intelligent officers and keepers, and a capable foreman 

 of construction, have all they can do to keep ahead of that one 

 elephant, so great is his ingenuity in thwarting our ways and 

 means to restrain him. 



In about two days of effort our elephant keepers taught 

 Gunda to receive a coin from the hand of a visitor, or pick it 

 off the floor, lift the lid of a high-placed cash-box, drop the coin 

 into it and ring a bell. This very amusing industry was kept up 

 for several years, but finally it became so popular that it had 

 to be discontinued. 



Keeper Dick Richards easily taught Alice to blow a mouth 

 organ, and to ring a telephone, to take the receiver off its hook 

 and hold it to her ear and listen. For years Alice has rendered, 



