44 THE WILDERNESS AND JUNGLE 



enthusiastically enjoyed than in England. In 

 their early boyhood, therefore, and also in the 

 autumn of life, after long years of work given, 

 it may be, to the service of their country under 

 other skies, Englishmen with a taste for these 

 country pleasures are singularly blest. In 

 middle life, however, a large number must, at 

 one time or another, go abroad, and the burden 

 of exile is considerably lightened by knowing 

 something of the wilderness and its animal life. 

 Nor, in these days of rail and steamer, is it a 

 very far cry from the elms and oaks of English 

 spinneys to the deodars of the Himalaya, the 

 teak forests of Burma, the cold and silent back- 

 woods of Canada, or the steaming jungle of 

 Central Africa. It takes but a couple of weeks 

 of turbine and locomotive to transport us from 

 quiet English fields to the rolling prairie, the 

 limitless veldt, the bleak steppes, or the in- 

 exorable desert. Arrived at those scenes, which 

 we have known hitherto only in our boyhood's 

 books of adventure, we shall find the animals 

 worthy of their setting. In place of the badger 

 and weasel, we are confronted with the ponder- 

 ous elephant and rhinoceros, the savage lion 

 and tiger, the broad-antlered moose and grace- 

 ful antelopes, heavy and treacherous wild cattle ; 

 in fact, with all manner of beasts, birds, and 

 reptiles, great and small, fierce or timorous, 

 harmless or venomous. 



