Whatever else I may have to do later in the day I manage to get to the Zoo for a little while every fine morning. Only thus can one obtain real intimacy with any of its inhabitants, whether they have souls or not. Only thus could I have become so close a friend of the wombat, that engaging stupid Australian with his broad, blunt, good-natured face. As the wombat lives on the north bank of the turgid dyke called the Regent's Canal, into which apathetic but sanguine Londoners drop bait all day with never a bite, and nursemaids drop surreptitious love-letters when they have read them a sufficient number of times, it is upon him that I pay one of my first calls, since it is by the Albert Road gate that I enter this attractive sanctuary: passing on my way Owls' Terrace, the solemn occupants of which are either reflecting so sagely upon life (far more sagely than anybody in Primrose Terrace) or are merely pretending to, no one will ever know which. After the wombat I visit the capuchin (or sapajou), whose peculiarity it is to be more like an old man seen through the wrong end of a telescope than any other monkey or ape will ever be, although it is the chimpanzee that has the credit of coming nighest to our perfect state. So it may, taken as a whole, but for human features, however wizened and poor, the capuchin (or sapajou) bears away the bell. According to the Zoo guide-book, the capuchin (or sapajou) differs from man principally in retaining his tail and possessing four more grinding teeth than even those of us who are lucky to keep the complement that Heaven allowed us. I then cross the canal by the private half of the public bridge, where the visitor to the Zoo is separated from the common outsider by an iron railing which makes each look to the other far liker a wild beast than is pleasant in this neighbourhood, and so come to my gentle friends, the giraffes, those pathetic survivals from the past whom American ex-presidents and gallant big-game hunters generally are so eager to exterminate. How any thinking creature proud in the possession of an immortal soul can bring his finger to pull the trigger at such an innocent, beautiful, and liquid-eyed vegetarian as this I shall never have imagination enough to understand; but they do it continually, and evidently have no compunctions, for they are photographed afterwards with one foot on the victim's corpse. And so past the island cave of the beaver, a creature upon whom no visitor's eye has ever rested, and who, for all the British public knows, may not be there at all, to the elephants, one of whom has been nodding his head against the bars and opening his inadequate mouth for buns ever since 1876, and will, I dare say, continue to do so for many years yet. How many buns he has eaten let the statistician compute. I have no doubt that if placed in a line touching each other they would extend from London to Adelaide in the usual manner.