184 
ALMOST HUMAN 
eye to deepest distress. Her friends had received the residue that she 
had not absorbed, and they were fully occupied in trying to rid them- 
selves of all traces of it, but her plight, her half-blinded, half-suffocated 
condition, was so truly pitiable that they soon forgot their own woes in 
trying to relieve hers. She had to be taken to an office and rendered in 
some measure fit to move through the streets — even to enter a vehicle 
to get home by the nearest route. So there was one woman who never 
again wished to see how a llama spits. This old llama is dead, and the 
young one at present in the Zoo is rather better tempered because it is 
so long since that provoking notice was there that a new generation of 
Zoo frequenters has almost forgotten which animal it is that spits. 
Occasionally, however, some one who goes the rounds teasing all the 
beasts finds that he has struck the wrong one, and as he leaves the 
gardens in a powerful rage, everybody near him hastens to give him a 
wide berth. 
CAMELS AND DROMEDARIES. 
People are often puzzled to know which has one hump and which has 
two humps, the camel or the dromedary. The dromedary is the racing 
one ; it has one hump, and is built for sustained speed, being able to cover 
about one hundred miles a day at the rate of ten miles an hour. The 
Bactrian camel can support a weight of one thousand pounds, and keep 
up a jog-trot of two-and-a-half miles an hour for many days with little 
food and less drink. The inside of its stomach-paunch is one mass of 
water cells which can easily hold a gallon-and-a-half of water against 
emergencies. 
The late dromedary at the Zoo was as fond of the stage as Merriwee, 
the donkey, and he frequently figured in plays with Eastern settings. He 
was trained to carry children on his back, and was a general favorite. 
The present one has so far enjoyed a lazy life as a purely show animal, 
and yet its placidity where children are concerned, and its obvious 
attempts to make friends with the Formosa deer next door to it, prove 
that before it has become a really old inhabitant it will be as great a 
favorite as its predecessor. 
There is more than a shade of romance surrounding this dromedary’s 
pedigree, for its parents were part and parcel of the Russian Stores 
Department during the Russo-Japanese war, and were captured in Man- 
churia by the Japanese in one of their victorious conflicts there. When 
peace was declared this pair of dromedaries were presented by the Jap- 
anese Government to the Zoological Gardens in Sydney, and their first 
little one born in captivity there was sold to the Melbourne gardens. 
The camel and the dromedary both have the same peculiarities in 
