CHAPTER XV 



SOME NATURAL HISTORY IN WHICH IT IS REVEALED 

 THAT A SING-SING WATERBUCK IS NOT A SING- 

 ING TOPI, AND THAT A TOPI IS NOT A SPE- 

 CIES OF HEAD-DRESS 



WHILE reading an account of the trophies secured 

 by Colonel Roosevelt on the Guas Ngishu Plateau, 

 I was mystified by seeing the name of an animal 

 I had never heard tell of a singing topi. For a 

 time I puzzled over this strange creature and finally 

 evolved a satisfactory explanation of how the ani- 

 mal made its appearance in the despatches. Briefly, 

 "there haint no sich animal," as the old farmer said 

 when he saw his first dromedary in a circus ; it was 

 merely a mistake, due to the telegraphic abbrevia- 

 tions which foreign correspondents employ to save 

 cable tolls. 



What the correspondent meant to say was that 

 the colonel had secured a sing-sing waterbuck and 

 a topi. The word "waterbuck" was omitted because 

 he assumed that everybody at home would know 

 that a "sing-sing" was a species of waterbuck, 

 wherein he was mistaken, for comparatively few 

 people in America know what a sing-sing is, or, for 

 that matter, what a topi is, or what a Uganda cob is. 

 When his despatch had been transmitted through 



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