In a beautiful ravine—which was carpeted with green moss a foot deep and shaded by evergreen trees hung in soft gray mosses—on an uninhabited island in northern Lake Superior, I once saw some Canada Grouse so tame that it appeared as if they might easily be taken in one’s hands. The parent birds were on one side of the trail, the young ones in a tree on the other side. All kept quite still for me to look at them, only the young ones lifted their wings slightly, as if wishing to fly across to their parents, who seemed to have an expression as of astonishment at seeing so strange a sight as a human being in their unfrequented solitudes. The gentlemen of our camping party declared that these Grouse were so tame it would seem a crime to shoot them. THE GIRAFFE. (_Camelopardalis giraffa._) Should a traveler returning from a far country describe a wonderful animal, with the head and body of a horse, neck and shoulders of a camel, ears of an ox, the tail of an ass, the legs of an antelope, and the coloring and marking of a panther, he would be believed with difficulty, and yet this combination very fairly describes the curious and interesting animal known to us as the Giraffe. This name is a corruption of the Arabian serafe, the lovely one, and while a single animal, away from its natural surroundings, may not seem to merit the appellation, in its native woods it produces a very different impression. The Giraffe is found in a wide curve, extending over the eastern half of Africa from Ethiopia as far south as the confines of Cape Colony. Within this area it frequents the sandy, desert-like portions where small trees and shrubs abound. Hunters and explorers describe with enthusiasm the appearance of the herds of Giraffe, which are sometimes in groups of six or eight, but more frequently found in larger numbers, often as many as thirty or forty being together, while one traveler in the Soudan counted on one occasion seventy-three, and at other times one hundred and three and over one hundred and fifty in one herd. Gordon Cumming tells us that “when a herd of Giraffes is seen dispersed in a grove of the picturesque, umbrella-shaped mimosas, which adorn their native plains, and on the topmost branches of which their immense height enables them to browse, the observer would really be deficient in appreciation of natural beauty if he failed to find the sight a very attractive one.”