132 
ALMOST HUMAN 
on either side of her. Cooled by the plunge, and tired by the unwonted 
exertion, she paused on the opposite bank to draw breath, and to see 
whether she was being pursued. When she saw that the keepers were 
coming empty-handed towards her, and that there was no sign of the 
obnoxious appendage, she stood waiting for them to come up, and allowed 
them to take her back to her house without the slightest difficulty. 
Apparently she decided that she had given sufficient evidence of her 
objections to doing such heavy ploughing for her living, and that she 
was reasonably safe from any further imposition for the present, at all 
events. She was right, for her strike was about the most successful 
in the history of strikes. It happened that circumstances suited her 
well. It took three men to break her in to the plough, and the staff 
was particularly busy just then; and the horses that were accustomed 
to the duty were available. So when she showed so unmistakably that 
she intended to be master of her fate, she was permitted to return to 
the child’s play of ambling around her beaten track with half-a-dozen 
little children strapped to her saddle, and to pretend that thereby she 
was exempted from participation in any other form of Zoo industry. 
RANEE. 
Queenie is a small Indian elephant. Her predecessor. Ranee, was 
a magnificent animal, who delighted several generations of children with 
her kindness. But Ranee had an uncertain temper. No one could 
account for her bad outbursts. She died after a week’s illness, at over 
forty years of age, and her body was presented to the Museum author- 
ities. When she was skeletonised, the cause of her ill-temper was made 
abundantly clear, and to-day visitors to the Museum can see what it was 
for themselves. Her great molar teeth should have been about four 
inches long. One of them was, but the other grew and grew until 
its growth was impeded by the bony structure of her proboscis, and the 
attrition of each can be plainly seen in her skeleton. The runaway 
tooth must be at least nine or ten inches long. She would never allow 
her mouth to be touched, and that was the reason why the extraordinary 
growth was not discovered during her life-time. 
Once Ranee was used to break in an elephant for another Zoo. This 
one was known as Siam because he was a present from the King of 
Siam. He was taken out in the ring with Ranee, and had the usual 
chain about his leg to guide his movements, but after a short time he 
thought he had had quite enough of such nonsense. He bolted off 
to his stable so savagely that all that could be done was to make way 
for him. Ranee, in all her twenty years of service, had never once 
