Now, as I have no motive but to attempt to record the truth, it is my
duty to set down quite frankly that I believe the Urchin showed more
enthusiasm over the stone and the robin than over any of the amazements
that succeeded them. I suppose the reason for that is plain. These two
objects had some understandable relation with his daily life. His small
mind--we call a child's mind "small" simply by habit; perhaps it is
larger than ours, for it can take in almost anything without
effort--possessed well-known classifications into which the big stone
and the robin fitted comfortably and naturally. But what can a child say
to an ostrich or an elephant? It simply smiles and passes on. Thereby
showing its superiority to some of our most eminent thinkers. They,
confronted by something the like of which they have never seen
before--shall we say a League of Nations or Bolshevism?--burst into
shrill screams of panic abuse and flee the precinct! How much wiser the
level-headed Urchin! Confronting the elephant, certainly an appalling
sight to so small a mortal, he looked at the curator, who was carrying
him on one shoulder, and said with an air of one seeking gently to
reassure himself, "Elphunt won't come after Junior." Which is something
of the mood to which the Senate is moving.
It was delightful to see the Urchin endeavor to bring some sense of
order into this amazing place by his classification of the strange
sights that surrounded him. He would not confess himself staggered by
anything. At his first glimpse of the emu he cried ecstatic, "Look,
there's a--," and paused, not knowing what on earth to call it. Then
rapidly to cover up his ignorance he pointed confidently to a somewhat
similar fowl and said sagely, "And there's another!" The curious
moth-eaten and shabby appearance that captive camels always exhibit was
accurately recorded in his addressing one of them as "poor old horsie."
And after watching the llamas in silence, when he saw them nibble at
some grass he was satisfied. "Moo-cow," he stated positively, and turned
away. The bears did not seem to interest him until he was reminded of
Goldylocks. Then he remembered the pictures of the bears in that story
and began to take stock of them.
The Zoo is a pleasant place to wander on a Sunday afternoon. The willow
trees, down by the brook where the otters were plunging, were a cloud of
delicate green. Shrubs everywhere were bursting into bud. The Tasmanian
devils those odd little swine that look like small pigs in a high fever,
were lying sprawled out, belly to the sun-warmed earth, in the same
whimsical posture that dogs adopt when trying to express how jolly they
feel. The Urchin's curators were at a loss to know what the Tasmanian
devils were and at first were led astray by a sign on a tree in the
devils' inclosure. "Look, they're Norway maples," cried one curator. In
the same way we thought at first that a llama was a Chinese ginkgo.
These errors lead to a decent humility.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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