sounds before. When a change of weather is
toward—which is very often—when thunder is
at hand, when the wind is in the east, and at
other seasons of discomfort, the poor beasts
behind the bars in the Zoological Garden
solace their misery by giving vent to the most
dismal moans and roarings conceivable, and
sometimes among the other sounds the thunder
of the lion's roar may be heard pre-eminent and
distinct.

On the night, however, to which I have
alluded, the outcry of these unhappy animals was
altogether of a different character. They had
been quiet all day, and all through the early
part of the night, when suddenly, and almost to
a minute, at twelve P.M., the whole chorus of
them burst out into one mighty shriek and yell
of passion, which lasted in its fury so considerable
a time that I came to the conclusion that
some altogether unprecedented event must have
taken place. In fact, I sat up in bed and said to
myself, as I struck twelve cheerful little strokes
out of my repeater:

"What can be going on to-night at the
Zoological Gardens?"

The reader shall hear what was going on.

At exactly fifteen minutes after nine P.M. on
the evening mentioned above, a party of four
gentlemen might have been observed ringing at a
little postern gate, which, when closed, forms
part of the fence of the outer circle of the
Regent's Park. With the reader's permission
we will adopt, in case it should be needful to
speak of any one of these persons, a practice
which has received the sanction of the Poet
Shakespeare, though he generally reserved it for
robbers, murderers, mobs, and other disorderly
characters—in a word, we will call them 1st
Gentleman, 2nd Gentleman, 3rd Gentleman,
and 4th Gentleman.

These four gentlemen, then, having rung at
the gate, and having been admitted by a keeper,
were by him guided to the house of the
superintendent of the collection; and it then
became apparent that their visit was a
premeditated visit, and that they had come there
by appointment, for the express purpose of
making a night inspection of the Gardens, and
ascertaining for themselves how that collection,
which we all know so well by daylight, looked in
the dark, or illuminated only by the light of a
lantern.

The party was formed with little delay. It
was headed by the superintendent, who was
closely followed by his four visitors; a guard of
officials connected with the place bringing up
the rear. At this time the feelings of our four
friends, as they moved across the Gardens with
a lantern in front and a lantern behind, were of
a peculiar kind, oscillating between a conviction
that they were going to sit up all night to see an
execution at daybreak, and a firm belief that
they were about to start immediately for foreign
parts, on a voyage attended with many difficulties,
and inconceivable peril.

It was quite possible to imagine that some
such journey was not only in contemplation, but
that it had actually been entered on and
prosecuted till the four travellers had reached some
remote and savage district thousands of miles
out of the way of civilisation. The small huts
and low buildings which were scattered about
being easily imagined into wigwams, and the
occasional cry of some distant wild beast, or the
shriek of some tropical bird striking on the ear,
much as they might do in some Indian jungle, or
Australian forest. The trees, too, in the darkness
showed only the vaguest outline of their
shape, and might have been shrubs of tropical
growth, for aught that could be said to the
contrary.

It was not long before the four gentlemen
who had found themselves suddenly transported
from Central London to Central Africa were
able to detect, at some considerable distance,
the form of an animal of huge size and ungainly
shape, standing motionless on the margin of a
small pool of water, which lay stretched out in
front of it. The lines of this creature were only
very vaguely discernible in the dim twilight of a
June night, and it was too far off for the lanterns
of the guides to be of any use. Supernaturally
still, supernaturally huge and terrible in its
forms, its faint grey masses only partially
relieved from the faint grey masses of the ground
and bank behind it, there was something so
ghost-like about this motionless spectre, that
3rd Gentleman remarked to 4th Gentleman as
the party moved on, that he saw now for the
first time that the particular monster which had
reappeared from time to time in all the fevered
dreams of which he had been the victim since
he was five years old, was, beyond all doubt, a
hippopotamus seen by twilight.

Compared with this vision, the next animal
with whom the travellers came in contact was
almost homely in its unimpressiveness. An
elephant lying down on its side close before you,
and snoring so regularly and so loudly, that it
was a wonder that his next-door neighbour, the
rhinoceros, did not kick at the partition to
wake him, is not, in truth, a spectacle to awe
the beholder. Our adventurers passed on, after
remarking to each other that they thought they
detected a self-contained fury in the eye of
the rhinoceros, which looked as if he could not
stand the snoring of the elephant much longer,
and would infallibly give warning next day.

Past the startled giraffes waving their heads
in alarm at this night-visit, the little party
moved on to where the vigorous and healthy
ostriches live side by side with a certain little
wan shy creature which is neither healthy nor
vigorous. It was pitiful to see that poor, bare,
wingless, featherless biped, the aptoryx, turned
out of that shelter and concealment which she
adheres to strenuously. The very wall of her
hiding-place had to be removed before there was
any possibility of getting her to show herself,
and her misery at being thus suddenly turned
out in the night with the glare of a lamp upon
her, and strangers peering at her through the
wires of the cage, was touching in the extreme.