500 



THRILLING ADVENTURES. 



on the point of laying hold of me with his trunk. At that 

 instant I fortunately had the presence of mind to take to my 

 legs, and to my no small astonishment I found myself so swift 

 that I thought I hardly touched the ground. The beast 

 however, was pretty close upon my heels ; but having at last 

 got to the wood, and crept away from him under the trees, the 

 elephant could not easily follow me. I am quite certain that 

 he could not see me in the place where I was at first, and that 

 therefore he must have found me out by the scent." So much 

 for the escape of Dirk Marcus, the Dutch boor, whose story 

 contains a good deal of the marvellous. Indeed it is not an 

 incurious matter in the history of mankind, that while, upon 

 all ordinary subjects, the Dutch are the most matter-of-fact 

 people on the face of the earth, they are the greatest romancers 

 in matters of adventure and of natural history ; and it is pos- 

 sible, indeed probable, that more unfounded but marvellous 

 stories of this kind originated with the early Dutch navigators 

 than with any other people on the face of the earth. 



But even Dirk Marcus was probably not so brave an ele- 

 phant hunter as the bushmen of the Cape, whom the Dutch' 

 settlers used to be as zealous in hunting and shooting in cold 

 blood, as they were in hunting elephants, or in carrying on a 

 campaign of extermination against the antelopes. The bush- 

 men not only shoot elephants with their poisoned arrows, but 

 come to close quarters with their assagais or spears, with which 

 they stick the great animal all over till he is bristled like a 

 porcupine, and the pain often causes him to accelerate his 

 own death ; as from his natural instinct of falling upon and 

 crushing the lion, when it springs on the hinder part of his 

 body, he fall upon the spears, and by this means pushes them 

 home to his vitals. When the inhabitants of one of the kraals 

 or villages of these rude people catch an elephant, it is a 

 day of as much joy as when the Greenlanders capture a whale. 

 The flesh of the elephant is cut up in ribbons, as is done with 

 beef in South America, and in many parts of Old Spain ; and 



