ANIMALS. 483 



with this slight punishment. The elephant, however, passed on 

 without any immediate signs of resentment; but coming to a 

 puddle filled with dirty water, he tilled his trunk, returned to the 

 shop, and spurted the contents over all the finery upon which 

 the tailors were then employed. 



An elephant in Adsmeer, which often passed through the 

 bazar or market, as he went by a certain herb-woman, always re- 

 ceived from her a mouthful of greens. Being one day seized 

 with a periodical fit of madness he broke his fetters, and running 

 through the market, put the crowd to flight, and among others, 

 this woman, who, in her haste forgot a little child at her stall. 

 The elephant recollecting the spot where its benefactress was 

 accustomed to sit, took up the infant gently in its trunk, and 

 conveyed it to a place of safety. 



At the Cape of Good Hope it is customary to hunt those 

 animals for the sake of their teeth.* Three horsemen, well 



* Before the settlements of the Portuguese on the coasts of Africa, in the 

 hiltor part of the fifteenth century, the olepliant ranged without much inter- 

 ruption, on the hanks of tlie great rixers, whose courses, even at our own 

 clays, have not been completely traced. In the plains of the kingdom of 

 Congo, where the herbage attains a wild luxru-iance amidst innumerable 

 lakes, and on the borders of the Senegal, whose waters run through exten- 

 sive forests, herds of elephants had wandered for ages in security. The poor 

 African, indeed, occasionally destroyed a few stragglers, to obtain a rare 

 and luxurious feast of the more delicate parts of their flesh ; and the desire 

 for ornament, wliich prevails even in the rudest forms of savage life, reu- 

 dercd the chiefs of the native hordes anxious to possess the tusk of the ele- 

 phant, to convert it into armlets and otlier fanciful embellishments of tlieir 

 persons. Superstition, too, occasionally prompted the destruction of this 

 powerful animal; for the tail of the elephant had become an object of reve- 

 rence, and therefore of distinction to its possessor: and the huntsman, ac- 

 cordingly, devoted himself to steal upon the unsiispccting elephant in his 

 pastuie, and to cut off his tiiil with a single stroke of his rugged liatrhet. 

 I!ut these were irregidar and partial incentives to tlic destruction of tlie 

 most mighty, and, at the same time, the most peaceful inhabitant of th« 

 woods. The steady and inexorable demands of commerce had not yet conm 

 to the shores of Africa, to raise up enemies to him in all the tribes amongst 

 whom he had so long lived in a state of comparative security. The trade in 

 i^■ory had been suspended for more than a thousand years. There were 

 periods, indeed, in the history of the refined nations of antiquity, when this 

 destruction of the elephant was as great as in modern times : — when Africa 

 yielded her tributes of elephants' teeth to the kings of Persia ; when the 

 people of Judea built "ivory palaces ;" when the gallies of Tyre had "benchea 

 of ivory j" when, contributing to tlie barbarous luxury of the early Greciuii 

 princes, 



"The spoils of elel'haiits tlie roofs inlav ;" 



•;i s 2 



