That is one of the child stages which takes us back to the old tribe life--their inexhaustible interest in animals, some distant echo of those long nights when wild men sat round the fires and peered out into the darkness, and whispered about all the strange and deadly creatures who fought with them for the lordship of the earth. Children love caves, and they love fires and meals out of doors, and they love animal talk--all relics of the far distant past. "What is the biggest animal in South America, Daddy?" Daddy, wearily: "Oh, I don't know." "I s'pose an elephant would be the biggest?" "No, boy; there are none in South America." "Well, then, a rhinoceros?" "No, there are none." "Well, what is there, Daddy?" "Well, dear, there are jaguars. I suppose a jaguar is the biggest." "Then it must be thirty-six feet long." "Oh, no, boy; about eight or nine feet with his tail." "But there are boa-constrictors in South America thirty-six feet long." "That's different." "Do you fink," asked Dimples, with his big, solemn, grey eyes wide open, "there was ever a boa-'strictor forty-five feet long?" "No, dear; I never heard of one." "Perhaps there was one, but you never heard of it. Do you fink you would have heard of a boa-'strictor forty-five feet long if there was one in South America?" "Well, there may have been one." "Daddy," said Laddie, carrying on the cross-examination with the intense earnestness of a child, "could a boa-constrictor swallow any small animal?" "Yes, of course he could." "Could he swallow a jaguar?" "Well, I don't know about that. A jaguar is a very large animal." "Well, then," asked Dimples, "could a jaguar swallow a boa-'strictor?" "Silly ass," said Laddie. "If a jaguar was only nine feet long and the boa-constrictor was thirty-five feet long, then there would be a lot sticking out of the jaguar's mouth. How could he swallow that?" "He'd bite it off," said Dimples. "And then another slice for supper and another for breakfast--but, I say, Daddy, a 'stricter couldn't swallow a porkpine, could he? He would have a sore throat all the way down." Shrieks of laughter and a welcome rest for Daddy, who turned to his paper. "Daddy!" He put down his paper with an air of conscious virtue and lit his pipe. "Well, dear?" "What's the biggest snake you ever saw?" "Oh, bother the snakes! I am tired of them." But the children were never tired of them. Heredity again, for the snake was the worst enemy of arboreal man. "Daddy made soup out of a snake," said Laddie. "Tell us about that snake, Daddy." Children like a story best the fourth or fifth time, so it is never any use to tell them that they know all about it. The story which they can check and correct is their favourite.