And at this the crowd laughed again.

“And is that what you have been doing, Freddie—­riding up and down in the elevator?” asked Mr. Bobbsey.

“Yes, and I liked it!” exclaimed Freddie.  “I wished Flossie was with me.”

“I’m here now!” said the “little fat fairy,” laughing.  “I can ride with you now, Freddie.”

“No!  There has been enough of riding,” said Mrs. Bobbsey.  “And you gave me a bad fright, Freddie.  Why did you wander away?”

“’Cause I liked an elevator ride better than staying up so high where the wind blew,” explained the little fellow.

And when they asked him more about it he said he had just slipped away from them while they were on the tower platform, gone back into the room and ridden down in the elevator with the other passengers.  No one realized that Freddie was traveling all by himself, the elevator man thinking the blue-eyed and golden-haired boy was with a lady who had two other children by the hands.

Freddie rode to the ground floor, and then he just stayed in the express elevator, riding up and down and having a great time, until the second elevator man began to question him.

“Well, don’t ever do it again,” said Mr. Bobbsey, and Freddie promised that he would not.

After this there was a lunch, and then they all went up to Bronx Park, traveling in the subway, or the underground railway, which seems strange to so many visitors to New York.  But the Bobbsey twins had traveled that way before, so they did not think it very odd.

“It’s just like a big, long tunnel,” said Bert, and so the subway is.

The Bronx Park is not such a nice place to visit in winter as it is in summer, but the children enjoyed it, and they spent some time in the elephant house, watching the big animals.  There was also a hippopotamus there, and oh! what a big mouth he had.  The keeper went in between the bars of the hippo’s cage, with a pail full of bran mash, and cried: 

“Open your mouth, boy!”

“Oh, look!” cried Bert.

And, as they looked, the hippopotamus opened his great, big red jaws as wide as he could, and the man just turned the whole pail full of soft bran into the hippo’s mouth!

“Oh, what a big bite!” cried Freddie, and every one laughed.

“Does he always eat that way?” asked Mrs. Bobbsey of the keeper.

“Well, I generally feed him that way when there are visitors here,” was the answer.  “The children like to see the big red mouth open wide.  And here’s something else he does.”

After the hippo, which is a short name for hippopotamus, had swallowed the pail full of bran mash, the keeper took up a loaf of bread from a box which seemed to have enough loaves in it for a small bakery, and cried:  “Open again, old fellow!”

Wide open went the big mouth, and right into it the man tossed a whole loaf of bread.  And the hippo closed his jaws and began chewing the whole loaf of bread as though it were Only a single bite.