Page:McClure's Magazine volume 10.djvu/471

Rh passage, they seek to caress him with their trunks. There is a tender glance for him in every eye. No little children ever showed more unmistakable signs of pleasure at a mother's appearance than these unemotional-looking creatures display at every coming of the keeper.

The larger elephants are housed in special cages, arranged facing each other, on either side of the forward and after hatch-ways. The space between the cages (about eight feet square) was at first left open to the sky, but the second day out found the two elephants on the after starboard side drenched with salt water. They trumpeted loudly against this treatment.

The rolling of the ship started one of the cages from its position, and, had it continued in the direction it started, it would soon have gone crashing down into the hold, elephant and all. The elephant himself gave the first warning of the danger. The instincts of an elephant are keenest when he comes to any uncertainty as to his footing. Conscious of his own weight, he is slow to believe any structure safe until its safety is actually demonstrated. This is why, in preparing for the present voyage, it was considered useless to try to get the larger elephants aboard by driving them over a gang-plank. In the case of the slipping of the cage, the man on watch found the elephant, late one night, showing pitiful signs of fear and distress; but was unable to discover the cause. He examined the lashings of the cage, and found them apparently all right. He watched the elephant carefully, and he noted that he tried to brace backward, with his full weight, every time the rolling vessel keeled to starboard, and at the same time trumpeted loudly, as if in special fear. When the watchman sought shelter from the weather by standing near the cage, the elephant would thrust his long trunk through the openings between the planks of the cage and wrap it round the watchman, as if to hold on, like a child clutching to an apron string. When daylight came, a closer examination revealed the fact that the cage had slipped about two inches. Workmen came and doubly braced it with stout stanchions, and the elephant wagged his head in manifest satisfaction, and the neighboring elephants seemed to share this pleasure with him.

Two elephants evidently suffered, for the first forty-eight hours out, with sea-sickness. One of these was the most unhappy-looking object ever seen. Mucus dropped from his mouth and trunk, and tears rolled at intervals from his watery eyes. He would curl his trunk around the lower bar of his cage and let it hang there up side down, wrong side outward. Sometimes he placed his ponderous jaw on the rail and wept. Then he permitted his proboscis to lie in the hay, "any old way," for some minutes at a time. He would pluck up a little now and then, and make a feint of eating a mouthful of hay; but it was "no go"—he rolled the morsel up carefully and put it away with a deep groan. If an animal suffers in proportion to its size, how he must have felt! The way in which he rolled his swimming eyes up to me, standing above him, was touching. The two rivulets of brine that furrowed down his massive cheeks reminded me of the tear-tracks on a dirty-faced boy.