THEIR Sunday's puddings. 
139 
were sure to come in at nightfall These rice puddings were 
the greatest luxury the elephant could have ; a mass of boiled 
rice about four or five tiipes the size of an ordinary pudding 
was prepared for each elephant every evening. The cook 
having carefully rounded the pudding would dig his fist deep 
down into the top of it, leaving a sort of hollow cup ; this 
was filled with a sweet kind of oil. The elephants were then 
drawn up in line, and the puddings being ready, at a given 
signal each one threw up his trunk and opened wide his 
mouth, when the Mahouts popped the luscious morsel with 
its oily accompaniment into the mouth, and no alderman 
could have eaten with more gusto the green fat of the turtle 
than the elephants did their rice puddings. 
One vSunday they did not come in for their puddings^ 
and early on Monday morning a messenger came up quite 
breathless to me (my hut being about four miles from the 
station) to say that the tame elephants were surrounded by 
a herd of wild ones, tliat the keepers dare not go in to 
rescue them, begging me to come at once, as the wild ones 
were killing our tame ones. 1 lost no time in collecting my 
rides and hastened down. I can hardly describe the scene I 
witnessed when I arrived. The forest usually so silent was 
now resounding in every direction with the screaming and 
trumpeting of the animals, and the crashing and breaking 
of bamboos. In fact the turmoil was quite appalling, and I 
had visions of my finest elephants being killed or maimed. I 
knew that the best thing to be done was to shoot one of the 
wild beasts, as that would at once disperse the herd ; now as a 
rule, one can always distinguish the tame from the wild 
elephant, for the former being regularly groomed and washed 
is as black as a piece of India rubber, while the wild animal 
