CHAPTER II. 

 CROCODILES, TURTLES, AND LIZARDS. 



" THE crocodile, the dragon of the waters, In iron panoply 

 fell as the plague, And merciless as famine, " is obviously a 

 creature that no poet can be expected to admire. And it 

 would perhaps be stretching sentiment too far to expect 

 them to do so. It is not a lovable beast. I have seen them, 

 huge ones, lying on a mud-bank , " like a forest-tree, basking 

 in the sun," as Mary Howitt says, or crawling through reeds, 

 and there was something in the demeanour of the thing 

 that always made me long to kill it. It lay flat, with a 

 sluggish affectation of humility that exasperated me, and be- 

 stirred itself with an air of helplessness that was positively 

 monstrous. 



A remarkable passage in Montgomery's "Greenland" 

 shows us a broad river " swarming with alligator * shoals " 

 and rolling "clouds of blood." Thomson has a " Behemoth " 

 that, "in plaited mail, rears his head" "glanced from his 

 side, the darted steel in idle shivers flies " and that " crops 

 upon the hills his varied fare." That the former knew what 

 he was writing about is as certain as that the latter did not, 

 yet each is a conundrum. When very young, crocodiles do 

 certainly go "in shoals." 



I have myself, in the Ganges' overflow, within eyesight 

 from my house in Allahabad, seen them so thick that their 



* "Alligator," it should be noted, is in poetry an aggravated crocodile. 

 It is what the scritch-owl is, among birds, to the owl. P. R. 



