Page:Harper's New Monthly Magazine - v109.djvu/258



pose upon the braided rag rug, lazily licking his paws. He raised his heavy head to blink with yellow eyes at his landlady.

"Well, as I'm a sinner, he's getting bald!" she exclaimed. "I'll bet a hairpin I could cure him and keep his mane from falling out!" In her interest she approached the brute fearlessly and laid a hand upon his neck. Joshua purred with a basso-profundo church-organ vibration. "Dandruff! I thought so. Looks like a snow-storm. Here, Mr. Steggins, you just reach me that bottle of Paderewski Hirsutine in the medicine-closet over your head, and I'll have a good growth of new hair started in less than a week. Say, does lion's hair ever turn gray? I've got some Brunette Rejuvenator that 'll fix his color just as natural as life. Or I don't know but what you'd call him a blond, after all. Seems to me he's kind o' betwixt an' between. He's sandy-complected, I should say." She regarded him judicially. "I believe I'll look up a ball of yarn for him to play with," she said, as she left. "I had no idea lions behaved so clever. Why, they're as much like folks as second cousins."

Her next visit was to the front parlor, where Jumbo Junior stood rocking to and fro like a ship at anchor in a swell, his lithe trunk questing the air with sinuous curves. He held it out to her inquisitively. She attempted to shake hands with him, but he drew back. "You ought to teach that critter better manners," she remarked to the Hindu. "Though, to be sure, I never did quite know whether an elephant's trunk was most like a hand or a nose. Will you look at them toe-nails! I do hope there aren't any of them ingrowin'. What does he want, anyway?"

Jumbo Junior himself answered her question by deftly removing her stick-pin from the front of her dress and carefully inserting it in the ceiling. After this, he waved his trunk aloft, broke a piece of glass from the hanging-lamp shade, and threw it on the floor.