Page:Scented isles and coral gardens- Torres Straits, German New Guinea and the Dutch East Indies, by C.D. Mackellar, 1912.pdf/206

160 they would look really well here, bounding about, if that is what they do in their natural homes. only know them in zoological gardens or in cages—here they would be charming, and add quite a zest to an afternoon stroll.

One tiger story always lingers in my memory. Once Cardinal Moran, the well-known Archbishop of Sydney, was having tea on board ship with my sisters and me. A man who was present related a long story of the tiger-hunting adventures in India of a friend of his. This person was in an open space in the midst of a tiger-haunted jungle, and, leaning his rifle against a tree, sat down at its foot to have a smoke. Suddenly a tiger appeared and the man swarmed up the tree, but left his rifle behind him. The tiger seemed amused and strolled about, smiling to itself, or perhaps gambolled and tried to catch its own tail as you see kittens do—what does a tiger do under the circumstances? Anyway, this tiger did the correct The man in the tree, however, liked dead tigers better than live ones, so he threw his hat into the jungle, and, when the tiger sprang after it, he slid down and got his rifle. The next chapter—but here His Eminence capped the story by rising quietly, giving us all a smiling bow, and said gently, as he sailed away, “I suppose the tiger put on that hat!”

Professor Biro only snorted when I asked him whether he could not show us a tiger. He took us to a place where he had had a house and lived in the forest two years before this collecting his butterflies and things; but in two years the jungle had grown 20 feet high and was an impenetrable mass, so we had to resign ourselves to believing his former house was in the middle of it.

I walked nearly all the way, gathering beautiful plant after beautiful plant, only to throw them thing.