Their recklessness was gone as they looked up, and saw a little boy and girl coming directly toward them. How their hearts beat, and how frightened they were! They had heard their mother say that if they got salt on their tails they would surely be caught, and fastened in a cage, and they dashed around the room wildly in their efforts to escape, too much excited to fly directly out of the window at first. They did manage to get out after a time, however, and when they went back home they were anything but a jaunty-looking party. One had scraped his wing against the wall until it bled, two others had lost nearly the whole of their tails, while the youngest had his feathers firmly glued down by syrup from the bread the little girl had in her hand. It was a hard lesson for them, but it did them good; and to-day, if it were possible to find those young sparrows, they would tell you, if they could, that they had decided to listen to the experience of their parents rather than bear the possible suffering by trying to find out for themselves. LANDING A RIVER-HORSE. BY WILLIAM O. STODDARD. "'What were we there for?'" said Uncle Marbury. "Why, we wanted to kill a hippopotamus." "Was Mr. Lloyd a great hunter too?" asked Cal. "Yes; he'd hunted all sorts of wild animals, and so had I. We could each say we'd killed lions and tigers and elephants, but we had never before gone after any hippopotami." "Hippopotamuses? Were there any there?" "That's where they belong. But don't say 'musses.' One is a hippopotamus. I killed five while I was there, and as soon as I had two of them, they were hippopotami." "My!" exclaimed Robert, "I never heard that before." Cal had his school atlas out on the table, and his finger was already pushing along up the west coast of Africa. "There's Angola." "Now find the river Coanza. There's any number of them, and they're all alike. Where are my spectacles?" "I've got it," said Cal. "Was that where you found 'em?" "They live along all those rivers. The banks are all woods and swamps and mud, and the rivers are just about fit for river-horses to wallow in." "River-horses!" exclaimed Rob, who was staring at a cut of one in his Natural History. "He's no more like a horse than this house is." "Well, no," said Uncle Marbury; "there isn't much horse about them, but they spend most of their time in the river, so half their name is correct. The first one I killed tipped over all our boats, so we had to swim for it." "Did he get a bite at any of you?" "It wasn't his fault that he didn't. We found out that fishing for river-horses was a serious piece of business." "Fish for them? What! with a hook and line?" [Illustration: KILLING A HIPPOPOTAMUS IN WESTERN AFRICA.] "Not exactly. It was a good deal more like fishing for whales. Mr. Lloyd and I went after them with a lot of black hunters. We took our guns, and they took their harpoons, and such a time as we had you never saw."