Next morning I woke to find Robinson’s prediction verified. I gazed gloomily at my hideous future through the eyes of an adjutant stork--a bird in poor feather--a piteous, comic object that made even the professional attendants laugh as they passed me. The public poured forth their wit upon me; the human misery in my eye merely served to accentuate the proportions of my beak, the length of my legs, the general air of ruin and decay which characterised me. I tried to talk again, believing all birds possessed the power; but I found that an adjutant stork does not. Doubtless Robinson knew this. He did not manifest himself that day, but on the following evening, after office hours, he arrived in the form of a house-sparrow and sat upon the edge of a bath where I was standing on one leg--that being, so I found, the most comfortable position. “Great Scott!” he chirruped, “you look as if you’d seen trouble and no mistake! How goes it?” “Devil!” I answered. “Tell me how long this loathsome tragedy is to last.” “All depends on you, Tarver. Primrose goes down every day to look at you and weep over you. The doctors are still undecided. Two hold out that you are alive, but all the others say you’re dead as a herring. I tell them I think you live.” “Is there no alternative except a union with Miss Robinson?” “None, Tarver. I’ve no hesitation in saying this: the marriage was made in heaven.” “In Thibet, more likely,” I replied, not without acerbity. “Has Providence taken any steps yet?” he asked civilly. The question gave me fresh courage. “No, but do your worst,” I answered; “I still have hope. You cannot rob me of life; you cannot alter my destiny.” “True,” he admitted, “I cannot; but I can give you about the worst time in these Gardens any man ever endured even in imagination. The day after to-morrow is Bank Holiday. Just you wait and see where you come in then!” After which threat he flew off. III I may as well say at once that on the August Bank Holiday of the present year I was a camel--one that carries children about. How many enjoyed exercise at my expense I cannot say; I only know that the tortures of the day appeared endless. I had lived a thousand years of physical anguish before the sun set. Then I was marched back to my stall with a sore hump and a sick heart. The ingenuity of my tormentor was more than human. I shall shudder to my dying day when I hear esoteric Buddhism mentioned, and it ages me even now to read or hear the name of Robinson. After the camel episode I had comparative leisure as a kangaroo, and then, upon the sudden arrival of an Australian ornithorhynchus at the Gardens, Robinson transferred me to this uncanny nightmare. On the occasion of my becoming the infant hippopotamus he accosted me again in the shape of the new giraffe, and told me that all the doctors, save one only, now considered that I was a dead man.