of lions and tigers, the schools of hippopotamuses, and the
mass-meetings of anthropoid apes. Above and beyond these in their
strangeness were the figures of humanity representative of the
globe-girdling British empire, in their drawers and turbans and their
swarthy skins, who could urge a patriotic interest, impossible for me,
in the place. One is, of course, used to all sorts of alien shapes in
Central Park, but there they are somehow at once less surprising and
less significant than these Asian and African forms; they will presently
be Americans, and like the rest of us; but those dark imperialings were
already British and eternally un-English. They frequented the tea-tables
spread in pleasant shades and shelters, and ate buns and
bread-and-butter, like their fellow-subjects, but their dark liquid eyes
roamed over the blue and gold and pink of the English complexions with
an effect of mystery irreconcilable forever with the matter-of-fact mind
behind their bland masks. We called them Burmese, Eurasians, Hindoos,
Malays, and fatigued ourselves with guessing at them so that we were
faint for the tea from which they kept us at the crowded tables in the
gardens or on the verandas of the tea-houses. But we were not so
insatiable of them as of their fellow-subjects, the native British whom
one sees at a Sunday of the Zoo to perhaps special advantage. Our Sunday
was in the season, and the season had conjecturably qualified it, so
that one could sometimes feel oneself in company better than one's own.
The children were well-dressed and admirably well-behaved; they justly
outnumbered their elders, and it was obviously their day. But it was
also the day of their elders, who had made excuse of the children's
pleasure in coming to the Zoo for their own. Some indeed were not so
much their elders, and the young aunts and uncles, who were naturally
cousins, lost themselves at times a little way from the children and
maids, in the quieter walks or nooks, or took boat to be alone on the
tranquil waters with one another. They were then more interesting than