Second Officer. “He would put his trunk round her waist, and lay his head on her shoulder as she stood on a ladder lashed against the side of his cage. And he would hang out his forefoot to have his pulse felt, quite in a Christian style. Then when Nurse Amy wanted to take his temperature, the docile brute would curl up his fire-hose—I mean his trunk—and open his mouth, so that the instrument might be comfortably placed under his tongue.”

“By gings, sir, this story is going to knock corners off creation!” gasped the Pressman, pausing to wipe his face with a slightly smeary cuff. “An elephant that understood the use of the therm—blame it! that beast robbed some man of a fortune when he passed in his checks!”

“We lost so many of the ordinary kind of instrument in this way,” went on the Second Officer, almost pensively, 10“that at last Nurse Amy was obliged to fall back upon the large thermometer and barometer combined that usually hung in the first saloon. But it recorded, to our sorrow, no improvement. The mercury steadily sank, and it became plain to Nurse Amy’s professional eye that her patient was not long for this world.”

10

“Say, do you believe elephants have souls?” queried the Pressman. The Second Officer deigned no reply.

“She could not leave him a moment; he trumpeted so awfully when he saw her quit his side. I forgot to tell you that from the moment he first felt himself attacked by sea-sickness his bellows of rage and agony were frightful to hear. The other animals became excited by them; they roared and snarled without cessation.”

“Raised general hell,” said the Pressman, “with trimmings.” But he wrote down with a sign that meant leaded spaces and giant capitals:

“Nobody on board got a wink of sleep,” said the Second Officer—“that is, unless the devoted Nurse Amy was by the sufferer’s side. Towards the end, when, exhausted by days and nights of arduous nursing, the devoted girl had retired to her deck-cabin to snatch a few moments of much-needed rest, the entire crew vied with each other in efforts to pacify Bingo, without the slightest effect. When they tried to put his feet in hot water he mashed the ship’s buckets like so many gooseberries, and shot the Purser down with half a trunkful of hot cocoa, which had been offered as a last resource. But on Nurse Amy’s appearing he grew pacified, and from that moment until the end the heroic woman never left his side. I begged her to consider herself and those 

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