Page:The Strand Magazine (Volume 5).djvu/37

 such as have set out upon the shameless career of the irreclaimable pun-flinger.

It was some time—years before I got rid of the impression left upon me by the first ostrich with which I became acquainted. He lived in an old picturebook, and would nowadays be considered quite out of fashion by up-to-date ostriches, having webbed feet and an improper number of toes. I like to believe that feet of this sort were popular among ostriches at that time, being loath to destroy early beliefs. From the same cause, I have other little private superstitions about the ostrich; there was no ostrich, so far as I can remember, in my Noah's ark, whence I derive my conviction that the species cannot have existed at the time of the Deluge, but has been evolved, in the succeeding centuries, by a gradual approach and assimilation of the several characteristics of the camel and the goose.

The two ostriches here, at the Zoo, have no pet names bestowed on them by the keepers. This is inconvenient, not to say unfair. They have been placed, it will be observed, in the stables hitherto occupied by the late lamented giraffes. It is a striking and notable instance of care and the sense of fitness of things on the part of the Society. These stables, they probably reflected, have all along been fitted with tenants twenty feet high—queer tenants, which were often called camelopards. We can't replace these with similar tenants, unfortunately, but we will do our best with animals as high as possible and with all available neck; and they shall be camel-geese. And here they are; a few feet short, unavoidably, but as high as possible; quite the equivalent of the giraffes so far as concerns the camel, and as much superior as one may consider a goose to a leopard. And here you may stand and watch them, or sit. And you may watch, if you please, for the coming of the giraffes which the Society are now anxious to buy, or for the wandering wraiths of those dead, dispossessed, and indignant. Meantime inventing names for the two camel-geese let us say Atkinson and Pontius Pilate