The young elephant has increased immensely, since last year, in stature
and girth. He is remarkably neat in his person, wisping himself all over
with hay for hours at a time. Whether he does this for cleanliness or to
obtain a flavor of elephant for the hay is doubtful, however, for he
always eats it after having made use of it as a flesh-brush for a good
while. Notices requesting visitors "not to feed or annoy the animals"
are posted on the compartments. In the case of the elephant, though, it
might be as well also to caution persons against making jokes about his
trunk--a low kind of ribaldry in which every carpet-bagger, who never
had one, seems to think himself bound to indulge.

There is a cinnamon bear in one of the outside cages, whose claws remind
one sharply that cinnamon and cloves go together, and that clove is a
tense of the verb "to cleave." But we do not want such a fellow as that
to cleave to us, since it is evident that a grocer kind of brute than a
cinnamon bear cannot be found in all the ursine family. "Sugar and
spice, and all things nice," are stated in song to be the materials that
"little girls are made of," but if we thought that cinnamon bear figured
upon the list of groceries thus used for modelling young maidens, we
would either fly to the desert with Dr. MARY WALKER or immure ourselves
in a nunnery with SUSAN B. ANTHONY, and all the other females of the
anti-sugar-and-spice persuasion.

Fattest of all the beasts in the Central Park collection is the larger
of the two grizzly bears. From the easy way in which he takes life, he
reminds one of a successful politician, who had worked his way up from
being a slim and impecunious "repeater" to the position of Alderman, or
Custom House official, and President of the Fat Men's Club. There is a
drunken leer in this beast's eye, an inebriate roll in all his
movements, that lead one mechanically to peer into the darkness of his