looking up.

“To attend to the animal on the voyage. It was understood that if the principal patient’s condition permitted, 7Nurse Amy was to pay the leopards such attentions as they were capable of appreciating, but there was no pressure on this point.”

7

“Ohowgh!” coughed the voice outside. “Yarr! Ohowgh!”

“He smells the land, I guess,” said the Pressman.

“Or the niggers,” suggested the Second Officer. “You ought to have heard Bingo when we were three days out from the Mersey.... We’d had a fair wind and a smooth sea at first, and nothing delighted the ladies and children on board like feeding him with apples, and nuts, and biscuits, and things prigged from the saloon tables. The sea-air must have sharpened the beast’s appetite, I suppose, for that old trunk of his was snorking round all day, and the Purser, who was naturally wild about it, said he must have put away hogsheads of good things in addition to his allowance of hay, and bread, and beetroot, and grain, and cabbages, and sugar——”

“Was he ca’am in temper?” asked the Pressman.

“Mild as milk.... As kind a beast as ever breathed; and elephants do a lot of breathing,” said the Second Officer. “The ladies and gentlemen in the upper-deck cabins used to complain about his snoring in the night; but as Nurse Amy said, there are people who’d complain about anything. And some of ’em didn’t like the smell of elephant—which, I’ll allow, when you happened to get to wind’ard of Bingo, was—phew!”

“Pooty vociferous?” hinted the Pressman.

“Until,” went on the Second Officer, “Nurse Amy took to washing him with scented soap.”

The pencil stopped. The Pressman looked up with circular eyes. “Scented——”

“Soap,” said the Second Officer. “No expense was to be spared—and we’d several cases of a special toilet 8and complexion article on board. By the living Harry! if you’d seen that elephant standing up over his morning tub of hot water, swabbing away at himself with a deck-sponge Nurse Amy had soaped for him, and then squirting the water over himself to rinse off the soap, you’d have believed in the intelligence of animals. The sight drew like a pantomime.... But by the sixth day out Bingo had 

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