The Elephant Keeper. Christopher Nicholson

been mined, might collapse under the weight of the Elephants. I called them to me, and we moved down a slope where the blue-bells gave way to a snowy spread of ramsons. The Elephants’ feet squeaked on the leaves, crushing them and making them smell strongly. However, instead of feeding on the ramsons, the Elephants hurried through them, making for a pond surrounded by willow and rush, and well known to me as a particular haunt of toads. As a boy, in late winter, I often used to visit it to collect the neck-laces of their spawn, or to watch the chaotic frenzy of their mating, when twenty or more glistening males would struggle to clamber on one unfortunate female. Now, in early summer, the pond was full of young toads, and as the Elephants waded in they swam frantically out of the way, while moor-hen scuttled for the cover of the rushes, and a pair of duck took flight. Having scooped up quantities of foul-smelling mud, which they splattered on their backs and flanks, the Elephants began to squirt water at each other in great jets, using their trunks like cannons. The sun made rainbows through the spray, and the mud dribbled down their flanks. They were like unruly children, and indeed as they wrestled with their trunks, or pushed, heads locked together, each heaving to dislodge the other and grunting with the strain, I thought that they were like human children in Elephant form.

      When, at length, I clapped my hands and summoned them out of the pond, they declined to hear, and continued with their sport. I shouted threats, and even brandished the ankus. They pretended not to notice, and this angered me, for I could think of no easy way to force them out of the water unless I myself waded in, which with the mud smelling so foul I was loath to do. I was obliged to wait for upwards of an hour while they wallowed and splashed away. In the end I resorted to cunning, concealing myself behind a tree, and in their curiosity to discover my whereabouts they splashed out of the water. Having caught their ropes, I gave the Elephants a severe reprimand, and though either could have knocked me down with the twitch of a trunk they heard me out and seemed to shrink back and repent. As we left the copse, we met a party of wood-men, whose alarm at the sight of two dripping, mud-soaked Elephants, draped in green weed, was so great that they flung down their tools and took to their heels.

      We made many subsequent visits to this spot and I never again had any difficulty in making the Elephants leave the water; in part, I think, because I used to reward them with sugar or a carrot, but also because they were anxious not to incur my displeasure. The wood-men grew to understand the innocent and peaceable character of the Elephants, and as word of our trips spread through the neighbourhood we often had company in the shape of boys and girls, who would run ahead or follow us, flitting through the trees, or peeping from a tree trunk, caught between apprehension and curiosity. A few children were bold enough to come closer; among these was a little maid no more than five years old, who approached very timidly one day. At her approach, Jenny and Timothy raised their heads, staring, so I signalled to them to stand still and walked over to the maid, who was holding some dry sticks of wood. Her name was Margaret Porter; she was the daughter of Robert Porter, a wheelwright. When I asked her if she knew what these great creatures were called, she shook her head. I said, ‘They are called Elephants and they are very noble and wise creatures, who come from far away across the sea.’ She put down her sticks and bravely took my hand and we walked toward the two Elephants, who were side by side. ‘Are you not at all afraid?’ I asked. ‘No,’ she replied, though she held my hand very tightly. To her they must have seemed as lofty as the giants which Gulliver meets in the land of Brobdingnag. I said to the Elephants, ‘May I present you my very good friend, Margaret?’ and two trunks slid through the air and began to explore her head and arms with the utmost politeness. She hardly knew, I think, whether to laugh or cry; at first she giggled, and then, forgetting her sticks, ran off as fast as her legs could take her. But she came back on other days, and soon became a favourite with the Elephants.

      Another of their favourites was Lizzy Tindall, a girl of my own age who lived in Thornhill. She was the daughter of the tanner, George Tindall. As children, we had sometimes walked together to the school-house in Gillerton, where she had a great reputation for mischief-making; this grew from the occasion when, having cut off her hair and rubbed mud into her face, she deceived the school-master, old Mr. Gibbons, into thinking that she was a gipsy boy. Here she was successful, but on another occasion, when she claimed to have seen an angel standing in the churchyard, she was soundly whipped for lying. Now she was employed in the Hall as a maid, or spider-brusher, as she called herself, which she found much less entertaining, and when she had time she would steal away, to chat with the grooms or stroke the horses, or to feed sugar to the Elephants. There was always a good supply of sugar in the kitchens, and since they loved it even more than carrots they became very affectionate toward her; indeed on one occasion Timothy became too forward, his trunk slipping from Lizzy’s neck into her bosom. She drew my attention to what he was doing, whereupon I told her to push the trunk out of the way, which she did, pat pat, but soon enough, back came the trunk. ‘Tom!’ she cried, ‘is this not deliberate! What a saucy Elephant!’ Indeed he was perfectly innocent and had no idea of the liberty which he was taking, and I said so; whereupon she tossed her hair (which, when she took off her cap, now hung half way down her back), and laughed, ‘I am not so sure, look at him! Look, Tom!’ and it was true that the Elephant continued to rout round. But there was a reason for this, as I soon discovered, which was that she had hidden a piece of sugar in her bosom, to test him out.

      While the Elephants held Lizzy and Margaret as particular friends, there were other people whom they regarded less favourably. Among these were my fellow grooms, Bob Brown and Dick Shadwick. I had once been on good terms with Dick, who was my elder by no more than three years, but since the arrival of the Elephants he seemed to have turned against me. At the time my voice had not yet broken and was still piping and shrill, and whenever he met me he would squeak like a mouse. This feeble joke afforded him vast quantities of amusement. I ignored him, but I could not stand idly by when he and Bob persecuted the Elephants. Bob used to divert himself by tossing the Elephants stones or pebbles, and sometimes they were deceived enough to take these offerings into their mouths, though they would generally spit them out soon enough. When I asked him to stop, he laughed. ‘If they are foolish enough to eat stones, let them do so,’ he said, and this filled me with indignation, for my father had often told me of a race-horse which had choaked after it was purged with too large a ball. The ball had lodged deep in the horse’s gullet, and all efforts to retrieve it with an iron instrument having failed, the animal suffered a miserable death.

      I found that my father did not greatly want to hear about Bob’s behaviour, and indeed he attempted to dismiss it as a mere prank, whereupon I interrupted, ‘Father, a prank that could end with the death of the Elephants.’—‘Well,’ said he, with great reluctance, for he hated arguments, ‘I will talk with him.’ My father went and talked to Bob. A short time later, Bob came up to me: ‘Tom,’ he said, ‘forgive me—I am sorry for the stones—and to shew this I should like to give the Elephants an apple each.’ There was a mocking smile on his face, and before I could prevent him he had held out two small green apples. Both Elephants took their apples and put them in their mouths; but while Timothy ground his to pulp, Jenny spat hers out and with it a nail. I was very angry and told Bob what a fool he was. ‘A fool?’ says he, sneering, ‘who are you to call me a fool? A stable-boy!’ I said that, if the Elephants were to die as a result of his apples, he would be the fool, and that, if he did such a thing again, I would tell Mr. Harrington. I had disliked him for years, ever since I had seen him set the tail of a dog on fire. Making animals suffer was one of his favourite sports. He often tormented frogs and toads, and I heard that he once poured a bottle of aniseed over the back of a cat when the hounds were running, and they clapped on the drag and tore it to shreds.

      One thing which I learnt from Mr. Coad was that, in the Indies, the captive Elephants were regularly ridden like horses, and I was resolved to try my luck in this respect, though the difficulties seemed formidable, and I could not imagine how it was done. None of the horses’ saddles was broad enough for an Elephant’s back, and mounting only seemed possible if the Elephant were to kneel or lie down, or to stand still while a ladder was placed against its side. What perplexed me most was how the rider, once perched aloft, directed his steed. Horses, with their sensitive mouths, are directed largely by means of the bit and bridle and the reins, and perhaps, I said to myself, Elephants equally have sensitive mouths, but it would take a strange bit and bridle to fit on an Elephant. Even if such a bridle could be