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New Foundland has pictured the seal and cod fish, Western Australia the black swan, Liberia the elephant and rhinocerous, and New Zealand the curious bird called the apterix, which is wingless and clothed in hair instead of feathers. Tasmania shows us her animal freak, the platypus paradoxus, the beast with a bill, first cousin to our tailors and butchers, all of whom are beasts with bills.
But instead of choristers in short skirts, tripping, the whoop-la and boosting the landlord's wine, one feasts the eye upon Münchenese of a rhinocerous fatness, dropsical and gargantuan creatures, bisons in skirts, who pass laboriously among the bibuli, offering bunches of little pretzels strung upon red strings. Six pretzels for ten pfennigs.
That he should then, when all eyes were upon him, express in his face the utmost contempt for the exertions of his friends and confidence in Marguerite alone, whom he would stand contemplating, not unlike the rhinocerous out of the spelling- book, tamed and on his hind legs, was a part of the Institution.
In the latter part of the Republic it was carried to an enormous extent: the elephant, the rhinocerous, the lion, and other wild animals, were brought from Africa to Rome for these occasions. When Sulla was prætor B.C. 93, he exhibited one hundred lions in the Circus, which were let loose and shot with arrows by archers whom King Bocchus sent for the purpose.
"What is he, a rhinocerous?" asked Migwan. "Would that he were!" exclaimed Nyoda fervently. "A rhinocerous, a wild rhinocerous, with an ivory toothpick on his nose, would be a simple problem compared to Kaiser Bill. No, my dears, Kaiser Bill is a goat, a William goat, with the disposition of a crab, the soul of a monkey and the constitution of a battle tank.
I don't know exactly how Faith managed to pierce the rhinocerous hide of his self-conceit with the truth, but she did somehow let him know that his attentions wuz futile, futiler than he ever mistrusted his attentions could be.
"But Frank, they don't have such things as elephants down in South America?" he expostulated. "Sure they don't," laughed Frank, feeling particularly good over the grand success that had attended their perilous landing. "Nor a rhinocerous, nor a hippopotamus; but they do have the next largest beast, and that's a tapir. He's something like a big pig and not very dangerous, the señor said.
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