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CHAP. IX.]   BULK OF THE RHINOCEROS.   171

and pokes about with his horn, while they scamper and scurry away from him in great alarm. He surely must often kill them.

For my.own taste, I should like to spend nights perched up in some tree with a powerful night glass watching these night frolics and attacks. I really do not much care about shooting the animals, though it makes a consummation to the night work, as the death of the fox does to a fox hunt, but it is the least pleasurable part of the whole. Great fun seems to go on among the different animals ; jackals are always seen and are always amusing ; their impudence is intolerable; they know that you do not want to shoot them, and will often sit in front of your screen and stare you in the face. Sometimes whilst straining your eyes at the dimly seen bushes about you, the branched stem of one gradually forms itself into the graceful head of some small antelope. The change is like that of a dissolving view, the object had been under your notice for a minute, yet you could not tell when it ceased to be a bush and became an animal. The young rhinoceroses must be much chased by the hyenas and wild dogs, for you never find one, either young or old, whose ears do not show marks of having been sadly bitten.

I do not think an elephant gives anything like the idea of bulk and power that the white rhinoceros does. An elephant is so short and so high upon his legs, that he looks what jockeys would call "weedy," in comparison to the low and solid rhinoceros. The largest of these that we shot was eighteen feet long and six high ; the head and neck forming, I should say, a third of the entire length. If a creature of this size be imagined against the wall of a room, an idea may be formed of his immense size. Their rush is wonderfully quick; they seem to me to get up their speed much quicker than a horse or any other animal I know. I really think that if a rhinoceros and horse caught sight of one another at the same instant, when not more than ten yards apart, the beast would catch the steed. Their movements are amazingly rapid when they receive a bullet.

Oct. 7M.-I had a most picturesque finale to a rhinoceros hunt. The Bushmen came to tell me that a black rhinoceros was lying wounded under some trees, about an hour off, and very savage, so I went to him, and put him up with a bullet as ha lay twenty-five yards from me. After the scrimmage which ensued, I ran after him, he going a lame trot, and I, as hard as I could pelt, putting three or four bullets into him at bog distances, and loading as I ran. At length we came to the edge