AMERICAN AGRICULTURIST. 
171 
THE ELEPHANTS OF THE EAST- 
A person who had never seen a wild elephant 
can form no idea of his real character, either 
mentally or physically. The unwieldy and 
sleepy-looking beast, who, penned up in his cage 
in a menagerie, receives a sixpence in his trunk, 
and turns with difficulty to deposit in a box, 
whose mental powers seem to be concentrated 
in the idea of receiving buns tossed into a gap¬ 
ing mouth by children’s hands; this very beast 
may have come from a warlike stock. His sire 
may have been the terror of a district, a pitiless 
highwayman, whose soul thirsted for blood; 
who, lying in wait in some thick bush, would 
rush upon the unwary passer by, and know no 
pleasure greater than the act of crushing his 
victim to a shapeless mass beneath his feet. I 
have heard people exclaim, upon hearing anec¬ 
dotes of elephant hunting, “Poor things!” 
Poor things, indeed! I should like to see the 
very person who thus expresses his pity going 
at his best pace with a savage elephant after 
him; give him a lawn to run upon if he likes, 
and see the elephant gaining a foot in every 
yard of the chase, fire in his eye, fury in his 
headlong charge; and would not the flying gen¬ 
tleman, who lately exclaimed, “Poor thing !” be 
thankful to the lucky bullet that would save 
him from destruction? There are no animals 
more misunderstood than elephants; they are 
naturally savage, wary, and revengeful, display¬ 
ing as great courage when in their wild state as 
any animal known. The fact of their great na¬ 
tural sagacity renders them the more dangerous 
as foes. Even when they are tamed, there are 
many that are not safe for a stranger to ap¬ 
proach, and they are then only kept in awe by 
the sharp driving-hook of the mohout. Ele¬ 
phants are gregarious, and the average number 
of a herd is about eight, although they fre¬ 
quently form bodies of fifty and even eighty in 
one troop. Each herd consists of a very large 
proportion of females, and they are constantly 
met without a single bull in their number. I 
have seen some small herds formed exclusively 
of bulls, but this is very rare. The bull is gen¬ 
erally much larger than the female, and is gen¬ 
erally more savage. His habits frequently in¬ 
duce him to prefer solitude to a gregarious life. 
He then becomes doubly vicious. He seldom 
strays many miles from one locality, which he 
haunts for many years. He becomes what is 
termed a “ rogue.” He then waylays the na¬ 
tives, and in fact becomes a scourge to the neigh¬ 
borhood, attacking the inoffensive without the 
slightest provocation, carrying destruction into 
the natives’ paddy fields, and perfectly regard¬ 
less of night fires or the usual precautions for 
scaring wild beasts. The daring pluck of these 
rogues is only equalled by their extreme cun¬ 
ning. Endowed with that wonderful power of 
scent peculiar to elephants, he travels in the 
day time down the wind; thus, nothing can fol¬ 
low upon his track without his knowledge. He 
winds his enemy as the cautious hunter advances 
noiselessly upon his tract, and he stands with 
ears thrown forward, tail erect, trunk thrown 
high in the air, with its distended tip pointed to 
the spot from which he winds the silent but ap¬ 
proaching danger. Perfectly motionless does 
he stand, like a statue in ebony, the very es¬ 
sence of attention, every nerve of sense and 
hearing stretched to its cracking point; not a 
muscle moves, not a sound of a rustling branch 
against his rough sides ; he is a mute figure of 
wild and fierce eagerness. Meanwhile, the wary 
tracker stoops to the ground, and with a prac¬ 
tised eye pierces the tangled brushwood in 
search of his colossal feet. Still further and 
further he silently creeps forward, when sud¬ 
denly a crash bursts through the jungle; the 
moment has arrived for the ambushed charge, 
and the elephant is upon him.— From the Rifle 
and the Hound in Ceylon. 
- ••• - 
If a man waits patiently while a woman is 
“ putting her things on,” or “shopping,” he will 
make a good husband. 
MY LITTLE BOY. 
BY G. DAVIES BEADWAY, M. D. 
I have a boy—as sweet a child 
As ever on a father smiled ; 
With dimpled cheek, and sparkling eye, 
And flaxen hair, and forehead high, 
And laughing, sunny, little face, 
Where sorrow ne’er has left a trace, 
And voice—that falls upon my ear 
Like to the murmurings of a brook, 
Whose silver waters, bright and clear, 
Flow gently from some shady nook. 
I love that child—he is a part 
E’en of myself—his little heart 
Will seem with childish grief oppressed, 
If “ father” lays him not to rest, 
Nor listens to his evening prayer, 
Or sings for him some well-known air, 
Which he has heard in days long past, 
Ere he was left, my only one, 
The bright, the fondest, and the last— 
My household god—my little son. 
Gleason's Pictorial. 
--• • •- 
A GOOSE STORY. 
At the mills of Tubberakeena near Clonmel, 
Ireland, while in the possession of the late Mrs. 
Newhold, there was a goose, which by some 
accident, was left solitary, without mate or off¬ 
spring, gander or gosling. 
Now it happened, as is common, that the 
miller’s wife set a number of duck’s eggs under 
a hen, which in due course were incubated, and 
of course, the ducklings, as soon as they came 
forth, ran with natural instinct to the water, 
and the hen was in a sad pucker, her maternity 
urging her to follow the brood, and her selfish¬ 
ness disposing her to stop on dry land. In the 
meanwhile up sailed the goose, and with a noisy 
gabble, which ctrtainly(being interpreted) meant, 
leave them to my care, she swam up and down 
with the ducklings; and when they were tired 
of their equatic excursion, she consigned them 
to the care of the hen. The next morning 
down came the ducklings to the pond, and there 
stood the hen in her great flustration. On this 
occasion we are not at all sure that the goose 
invited the hen, observing her maternal trouble, 
but it is a fact that she being near the shore, 
the hen jumped on her back, and there sat, the 
ducklings swimming, and the goose and hen 
after them, up and down the pond. And this 
was not a solitary event. Day by day the hen 
was seen on board the goose, attending the 
ducklings up and down in perfect contentedness 
and good humor, numbers of people coming to 
witness the circumstances, which continued un¬ 
til the ducklings, coming to the days of discre¬ 
tion, required no longer the joint guardianship 
of goose and the hen.— Our Drawer. 
April Fools. —Our friend of the Albany 
Register carries his eyes in his head as he walks 
the streets of that quiet village, and narrates 
many curious and .amusing incidents. Some¬ 
times we suspect him of great inventive facul¬ 
ties—but the following story of an April joke, 
is as good as any we have seen : 
Speaking of the beginning of April, will any 
body tell us where the custom came from, 
which makes every body try to fool every body, 
on the first day of that capricious month ? We 
saw a funny thing on the first day of 
April down in Green street. Did any body 
ever see any body pass by an old hat on the 
sidewalk, without giving it a kick? AVe do not 
believe such a thing ever happened. AVell, a 
wag seized upon this characteristic, out of 
which to make a little amusement, on “ all fools 
day.” So he procured a boulder, weighing some 
twenty pounds or more, and laying it upon the 
sidewalk, placed over it an ancient weather¬ 
beaten hat. 
The first person who passed that way, was a 
jolly, rollicking young man, who went whistling 
“ Jordan is a hard road to travel,” and as he 
came opposite the hat, placed so temptingly in 
his way, he gave it a rousing kick, expecting of 
course to see it go skiving into the middle of 
the street. But it didn’t move, and the kicker 
picked up his toe in both hands, and hopped 
about, and became emphatic in his language, in 
a manner that made the perpetrator of the 
joke dodge around the corner. In a moment 
afterward, a gentleman came that way, with a 
cricket club on his shoulder, which he brought 
down with a swoop against the hat, expecting 
to see it take a hoist over the lamp-post on the 
adjacent corner. But it didn’t; while the 
cricket club as it rung against the stone, flew 
half way across the street, and the striker fell 
to dancing about, blowing his fingers as if they 
were cold, and using a good many words not 
found in any religious work of that day. We 
stayed long enough to see a dozen or more as¬ 
saults, perpetrated upon that old hat that con¬ 
cealed the boulder, and every time the attack¬ 
ing party got the worst of the bargain. 
Preservation of Vegetables. —A French 
agriculturist has just published a process which 
he has employed for the preservation of beet¬ 
root, and which is equally applicable to potatoes, 
carrots, &c. The plan pursued by him is des¬ 
cribed as follows :—“At the time of gathering 
the crop I cut off the leaves, and having first 
strewed a layer of the ashes of liquites on the 
ground, place a layer of the beet-root on it, and 
then go on with alternate layers of ashes and 
beet-root until the whole are deposited, after 
which the pile is covered with ashes, so as to 
keep the roots from the cold, the air, and the 
light. Where the pile rests against a wall or a 
partition, ashes must be thrown between it and 
the roots. For want of the ashes of liquites, 
coal or turf ashes may be used, or even dry 
sand; but the last-mentioned article is not so 
effectual in absorbing the damp, This manner 
of proceeding prevents the roots from germinat¬ 
ing, and consequently preserves them fit for 
use.” 
- • • • - 
Gas not Unhealthy.— An opinion is widely 
prevalent that gas is unfitted for the illumina¬ 
tion of private dwellings, owing to the heat and 
noxious gases it evolves : nothing can be more 
erroneous. The heat, it is true, is in proportion 
to the light given off; and if, as has been found 
to be the case, a four-inch pipe will supply as 
many burners sufficient to outvie the blaze of 
2000 mould candles, (each candle consuming 
175 grains of tallow per minute,) the quantity 
of caloric and carbonic acid given off will be 
found to be in each case pretty near identical. 
The Argand, or shadowless gas burner, if en¬ 
circled by a pale blue glass, yields a perfectly 
homogeneous white light, as pure almost as that 
of day, enabling artists to pursue their labors 
as satisfactorily during the night as during the 
blaze of a southern summer’s day. The ex¬ 
pense of artificial light is in the following order, 
coal-gas being by far the cheapest, then vegeta¬ 
ble oil, sperm oil, tallow, stearine, wax.— Neic 
Quarterly Review. 
- »-♦ « - 
A Wonder. —The Fermanagh Reporter states 
that Mr. Phillip Monahan, of Drummackin, 
near Tempo, in this county, is a patriarch of 
85 years, and a great grandfather; his wife is 
60, some say much above it, without a tooth in 
her head. This venerable couble became, on 
the night of Friday last, the happy parents of 
a boy. 
Preserve your conscience always soft and 
sensitive. If but one sin force its way into that 
tender part of the soul and dwell easy there, 
the road is paved for a thousand iniquities.— 
Watts. 
