THEIR SUNDAYS PUDDINGS. 139 



were sure to come in at nightfall. These rice puddings were 

 the greatest luxury the elephant could have ; a mass of boiled 

 rice about four or five times the size of an ordinary pudding 

 was prepared for each elephant every evening. The cook 

 having carefully rounded the pudding would dig his fist deep 

 down into the top of it, leaving a sort of hollow cup ; this 

 was filled with a sweet kind of oil. The elephants were then 

 drawn up in line, and the puddings being ready, at a given 

 signal each one threw up his trunk and opened wide his 

 mouth, when the Mahouts popped the luscious morsel with 

 its oily accompaniment into the mouth, and no alderman 

 could have eaten with more gusto the green fat of the turtle 

 than the elephants did their rice puddings. 



One Sunday they did not come in for their puddings, 

 and early on Monday morning a messenger came up quite 

 breathless to me (my hut being about four miles from the 

 station) to say that the tame elephants were surrounded by 

 a herd of wild ones, that the keepers dare not go in to 

 rescue them, begging me to come at once, as the wild ones 

 were killing our tame ones. I lost no time in collecting my 

 rifles and hastened down. I can hardly describe the scene I 

 witnessed when I arrived. The forest usually so silent was 

 now resounding in every direction with the screaming and 

 trumpeting of the animals, and the crashing and breaking 

 of bamboos. In fact the turmoil was quite appalling, and I 

 had visions of my finest elephants being killed or maimed. I 

 knew that the best thing to be done was to shoot one of the 

 wild beasts, as that would at once disperse the herd ; now as a 

 rule, one can always distinguish the tame from the wild 

 elephant, for the former being regularly groomed and washed 

 is as black as a piece of India rubber, while the wild animal 



