“This went on for between an hour and an hour and a half, till, what between excitement and hope, that maketh the heart sick, I grew so weary that I was actually contemplating a descent from the tree and a moonlight stalk.  Such an act in ground so open would have been that of a stark staring lunatic, and that I should even have been contemplating it will show you the condition of my mind.  But everything comes to him who knows how to wait, and sometimes too to him who doesn’t, and so at last those elephants, or rather one of them, came to me.

“After they had fed their fill, which was a very large one, the noble three stood once more in line some seventy yards to the left of the hut, and on the edge of the cultivated lands, or in all about eighty-five yards from where I was perched.  Then at last the one with a single tusk made a peculiar rattling noise in his trunk, just as though he were blowing his nose, and without more ado began to walk deliberately toward the hut where the old woman slept.  I made my rifle ready and glanced up at the moon, only to discover that a new complication was looming in the immediate future.  I have said that a wind rose with the moon.  Well, the wind brought rain-clouds along its track.  Several light ones had already lessened the light for a little while, though without obscuring it, and now two more were coming up rapidly, both of them very black and dense.  The first cloud was small and long, and the one behind big and broad.  I remember noticing that the pair of them bore a most comical resemblance to a dray drawn by a very long raw-boned horse.  As luck would have it, just as the elephant arrived within twenty-five yards or so of me, the head of the horse-cloud floated over the face of the moon, rendering it impossible for me to fire.  In the faint twilight which remained, however, I could just make out the gray mass of the great brute still advancing towards the hut.  Then the light went altogether and I had to trust to my ears.  I heard him fumbling with his trunk, apparently at the roof of the hut; next came a sound as of straw being drawn out, and then for a little while there was complete silence.

“The cloud began to pass; I could see the outline of the elephant; he was standing with his head quite over the top of the hut.  But I could not see his trunk, and no wonder, for it was inside the hut.  He had thrust it through the roof, and, attracted no doubt by the smell of the mealies, was groping about with it inside.  It was growing light now, and I got my rifle ready, when suddenly there was a most awful yell, and I saw the trunk reappear, and in its mighty fold the old woman who had been sleeping in the hut.  Out she came through the hole like a periwinkle on the point of a pin, still wrapped up in her blanket, and with her skinny arms and legs stretched to the four points of the compass, and as she did so, gave that most alarming screech.  I really don’t know who was the most frightened,