much bigger. All the same, he had no manners then, and he has no
manners now, and he never will have any manners. He said, 'How!'
and the Parsee left that cake and climbed to the top of a palm
tree with nothing on but his hat, from which the rays of the sun
were always reflected in more-than-oriental splendour. And the
Rhinoceros upset the oil-stove with his nose, and the cake rolled
on the sand, and he spiked that cake on the horn of his nose, and
he ate it, and he went away, waving his tail, to the desolate and
Exclusively Uninhabited Interior which abuts on the islands of
Mazanderan, Socotra, and Promontories of the Larger Equinox.
Then the Parsee came down from his palm-tree and put the stove on
its legs and recited the following Sloka, which, as you have not
heard, I will now proceed to relate:--

Them that takes cakes
Which the Parsee-man bakes
Makes dreadful mistakes.

And there was a great deal more in that than you would think.

Because, five weeks later, there was a heat wave in the Red Sea,
and everybody took off all the clothes they had. The Parsee
took off his hat; but the Rhinoceros took off his skin and
carried it over his shoulder as he came down to the beach to
bathe. In those days it buttoned underneath with three buttons
and looked like a waterproof. He said nothing whatever about the
Parsee's cake, because he had eaten it all; and he never had any
manners, then, since, or henceforward. He waddled straight into
the water and blew bubbles through his nose, leaving his skin on
the beach.