There might have been too many bears; but this was the fault of all their fellow-captives except perhaps the elephants. One cannot really have enough of elephants; and one would have liked a whole herd of giraffes, and a whole troop of gnus would not have glutted one's pleasure in their goat-faces, cow-heads, horse-tails, and pig-feet. But why so many snakes of a kind? Why such a multiplicity of crocodiles? Why even more than one of that special pattern of Mexican iguana which looked as if cut out of zinc and painted a dull Paris green? Why, above all, so many small mammals? Small mammals was the favorite phrase of the friendly colored chairman, who by this time had appeared with an old-soldier comrade and was pushing the companions about from house to house and cage to cage. Small mammals, he warned them, were of an offensive odor, and he was right; but he was proud of them and of such scientific knowledge of them as he had. The old soldier did not pretend to have any such knowledge. He fell into a natural subordination, and let his colored superior lead the way mostly, though he asserted the principle that this is a white man's country by pushing first to the lions' house instead of going to the flying-cage, as his dark comrade instructed him. It was his sole revolt. "But what," we hear the reader asking, "is the flying-cage?" We have not come to that yet; we are lingering still at the lions' house, where two of the most amiable lions in the world smilingly illustrate the effect of civilization in such of their savage species as are born in the genial captivity of Bronx Park. We are staying a moment in the cool stone stable of the elephants and the rhinoceroses and the hippopotamuses; we are fondly clinging to the wires of the cages where the hermit-thrushes, snatched from their loved solitude and mixed with an indiscriminate company of bolder birds, tune their angelic notes only in a tentative staccato; we are standing rapt before the awful bell-bird ringing his sharp, unchanging, unceasing peal, as unconscious of us as if he had us in the heart of his tropical forest; we are waiting for the mighty blue Brazilian macaw to catch our names and syllable them to the shrieking, shrilling, snarling society of parrots trapezing and acrobating about him; we are even stopping to see the white peahen wearing her heart out and her tail out against her imprisoning wires; we are delaying to let the flying-cage burst upon us in the unrivalled immensity promised. That is, we are doing all this in the personalities of those holiday companions, who generously found the cage as wide and high as their chair-men wished, and gratefully gloated upon its pelicans and storks and cranes and swans and wild geese and wood-ducks and curlews and sea-pigeons, and gulls, and whatever other water-fowl soars and swims. It was well, they felt, to have had this kept for the last, with its great lesson of a communistic captivity in