ADVENTURES ALONG THE TANA 



plete importance. The old gentleman bosses his 

 harem outrageously, and each and every member of 

 the tribe walks about with short steps and a stuffy 

 parvenu small-town self-sufficiency. One is quite 

 certain that it is only by accident that they have 

 long tusks and live in Africa, instead of rubber-plants 

 and self-made business and a pug-dog within com- 

 muters' distance of New York. But at the slightest 

 alarm this swollen and puffy importance breaks 

 down completely. Away they scurry, their tails 

 held stiffly and straightly perpendicular, their short 

 legs scrabbling the small stones in a frantic effort 

 to go faster than nature had intended them to go. 

 Nor do they cease their flight at a reasonable distance, 

 but keep on going over hill and dale, until they fairly 

 vanish in the blue. I used to like starting them 

 off this way, just for the sake of contrast, and also 

 for the sake of the delicious but impossible vision 

 of seeing their human prototypes do likewise. 



When a wart-hog is at home, he lives down a hole. 

 Of course it has to be a particularly large hole. He 

 turns around and backs down it. No more peculiar 

 sight can be imagined than the sardonically tooth- 

 some countenance of a wart-hog fading slowly in the 

 dimness of a deep burrow, a good deal like Alice's 

 Cheshire Cat. Firing a revolver, preferably with 

 smoky black powder, just in front of the hole annoys 



287 



