BEHEMOTH AND THE UNICORN. 603 
resist giving it for the contrast between the mental habitudes 
of the two men it affords. While Harris is simply content 
with giving a clear and effective delineation of what he sees, 
Cumming is so egregiously beset with the mania for the pro- 
di-gi-ous and for the amplification of his own deeds, that it is 
evident if he had chanced to have seriously encowntered 
‘‘rats” during his “five years in South Africa,” they would 
have been nothing short of mammoth rats—or colossal 
at the very least. He had come upon a herd of fourteen 
hippopotami, several of which he had already wounded and 
lost, having made his first shot at one which temporarily 
escaped. He says of it— 
The one I had first shot was now resting with half her 
body above water on a sand-bank in the Limpopo. From 
this resting-place I started her with one shot in the shoulder 
and another in the side of the head; this last shot set 
her in motion once more, and she commenced struggling 
in the water in the most extraordinary manner, disappearing 
for a few seconds, and then coming up like a great whale, 
setting the whole river in an uproar. Presently she took 
away down the stream, holding to the other side; but, 
again returning, I finished her with a shot in the middle 
of the forehead. This proved a most magnificent specimen 
of the female of the wondrous hippopotamus, an animal with 
which I was extremely surprised and delighted. She far 
surpassed the brightest conceptions I had formed of her, 
being a larger, a more lively, and in every way a more 
interesting animal that certain writers had led me to expect. 
The “certain writers” alluded to so significantly, must 
include our friend Harris, who so clearly differs with the 
enthusiastic elephant-hunter in his admiring appreciation of 
the sprightly graces of the sea-cow. It is always a pity 
when doctors disagree, but it rather seems like adding insult 
to injury on the part of Cumming, when he first steals from 
his master Harris, and then snubs him. 
