By EDISON MARSHALL

From _Everybody's Magazine_

An elephant is old on the day he is born, say the natives of Burma, and
no white man is ever quite sure just what they mean. Perhaps they refer
to his pink, old-gentleman's skin and his droll, fumbling, old-man ways
and his squeaking treble voice. And maybe they mean he is born with a
wisdom such as usually belongs only to age. And it is true that if any
animal in the world has had a chance to acquire knowledge it is the
elephant, for his breed are the oldest residents of this old world.

They are so old that they don't seem to belong to the twentieth century
at all. Their long trunks, their huge shapes, all seem part of the
remote past. They are just the remnants of a breed that once was great.

Long and long ago, when the world was very young indeed, when the
mountains were new, and before the descent of the great glaciers taught
the meaning of cold, they were the rulers of the earth, but they have
been conquered in the struggle for existence. Their great cousins, the
mastodon and the mammoth, are completely gone, and their own tribe can
now be numbered by thousands.

But because they have been so long upon the earth, because they have
wealth of experience beyond all other creatures, they seem like
venerable sages in a world of children. They are like the last veterans
of an old war, who can remember scenes and faces that all others have
forgotten.

Far in a remote section of British India, in a strange, wild province