III. Here Come the Elephants!
That is what the children shout when a circus parade marches through a town. The elephant is the children's delight. Draped in purple and gold he walks with the tread of an emperor before a conquered army. All the other wild beasts are in cages, but he, the largest and strongest of them all, a three-ton mountain of an animal, is led by his keeper as if he were a big, good-natured dog. And oh, if there is a baby elephant the children just about go crazy.
No wonder! Baby elephants are scarce. Even in her home on African plains, or in the East Indian jungle, a mother elephant has a baby only once in ten or fifteen years, so there are never more than a few babies at a time in a big herd of a hundred or more elephants. It's a great event when one is born in captivity. Such a baby! He weighs two hundred pounds at birth, is nearly three feet high and has a funny little trunk about as long as your twelve-inch ruler. And you never saw such a baby for growing! At the age of one year he weighs a half a ton. When he is hungry he squats in front of his mama, spreading his hind legs out behind him, pokes his head up between her front legs and sucks milk with his mouth, just like a calf. She pets him with her trunk while he nurses, and she doesn't wean him until he is two years old.
A baby elephant is as solemn as an Indian papoose. But in his own clumsy way he is very playful. He plays hide-and-seek between his mother's legs, and pulls her foolish little tail with his trunk. When anything alarms him, he gets right under her and shuffles along that way. And when she crosses a stream he climbs on her back until he learns to swim. In one thing he doesn't get over being a baby until he is a grandfather. He spends half his life cutting new teeth. An elephant has twenty-four grinding teeth in all, but he cuts and uses only four at a time. As one set wears down a new set appears just behind. Maybe it is cutting teeth that makes a big, fifty-year-old elephant peevish, sometimes.
There is a secret that a very young baby elephant can tell you that even his mama doesn't know. Ages ago there were elephants and mammoths and mastodons that were much like them, only twice as big as any elephant living today. They lived all over Europe and America, some of them away up in the coldest countries where
