man walks backwards in front of him with the point of his pike presented at his head, and two others, one at each ear, holding their pointed crooks. On reaching the water, the dread of having the crook pressed against his backbone makes him immediately lie down. After this the process is easy. They vary much in disposition. Some will within even a day or two feed out of a man's hand. The great secret is, while proving to them the power of man, to treat them with kindness and to win their confidence. From the treatment their feet receive when being captured, they will not allow them to be touched for months and years afterwards without exhibiting signs of anger. Though in other respects tamed, they cannot be put to work for three or four months--indeed, till they take their food eagerly, and flourish on it. Otherwise they quickly die, as the natives say, of a broken heart. They are taught to draw a waggon, or to tread clay for forming bricks; but by far the most important service they render is in piling timber and removing large blocks of stone. It is most curious to observe the way in which one will take up a huge log of timber in his trunk and carry it through a narrow road, turning it longways when there is not width to allow it to pass, and avoiding all impediments, and finally placing log after log on the pile with the greatest regularity. This he will do without any driver to guide his movements, and directed entirely by his own sagacity. From what I could learn, the average age of elephants is about seventy years, though some have been known to have lived twice as long; and one elephant, who only lately died, and whose skeleton, I have heard, in in the Museum of Natural History at Belfast, was successively in the service of the Dutch and English Governments--certainly for upwards of a century. Probably he was a hundred and twenty years old at least. The natives believe that elephants bury their own dead. Certain it is that they remove them from any spot which they are accustomed to frequent, shoving their bodies on with their heads or tusks, or dragging them with their trunks. Others believe that elephants select some remote and sequestered spot by the side of a lake surrounded by mountains, and thither they resort when they feel their death approaching, that they may lie down and die tranquilly. The popular belief, however, is that they live to an almost illimitable age when in a state of freedom; and that is the reason why their dead bodies are seldom or never found, unless they have met their death from the sportsman's rifle.