As we issue again into the open air, we have before us the whole length of the avenue, arched with lime-trees, in summer a veritable isle of verdure. What a charming picture it used to be to see the docile elephant pacing towards us with ponderous and majestic steps, whilst, in the scarlet howdha, happy children swayed from side to side as she marched. She, who was our delight for so many years, died some time since of a storm of thunder and lightning. Such indeed was what may seem at first the singular verdict of the medical man who made his _post mortem_. The terror, however, inspired by the storm appears to have produced some nervous disease, under which she succumbed. There is a suspicion that the carcase, five thousand pounds and upwards in weight, which was disposed of to the nackers, ultimately found its way to the sausage-makers. Do not start, good reader; elephant's flesh is considered excellent eating by the tribes of South Africa, and the lion-slayer tells us that the feet are a true delicacy. He used to eat them as we do Stilton cheese, scooping out the interior and leaving the rind; he exhibited to his audience some of these relics, which looked like huge leather fire-buckets. And now we have only the young animal left, that once sucked his huge mother, to the delight of the crowd of children, and to the disgust of the rhinoceros, who is the sworn enemy to all elephants. The little one is growing apace, however, and has already been promoted to carry the long-deserted howdha. The rhinoceros, close at hand, is the successor of the fine old fellow purchased in 1836 for 1,050_l._, the largest sum ever given by the society for a single animal. The specimen now in the gardens cost only 350_l._ in 1850, so much do these commodities fluctuate in value. His predecessor, who departed this life full of years, was constantly forced upon his belly by a pugnacious elephant, who pressed his tusks upon the back of his neighbour when he came near the palings which separated their inclosures. This rough treatment appears to have led to his death, as Professor Owen found, on dissecting the massive brute, which weighed upwards of two tons, that the seventh rib had been fractured at the bend near the vertebral end, and had wounded the left lung.