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The Seaforth News, 1952-04-17, Page 2When Elephants Fall In Love . . "You know," said the elephant keeper proudly, as he stood on a tub to brush down Rosy's wrinkled hide with 'a yard broom, "this circus wouldn't be a circus without leer," And certainly, among perform - Mg animals, none is more interest- ing than the elephant: that living bundle of eontt sdiction< co intelli- gent, and yet. tt times, so foolish; so degnified, yet (blighting to play the down; so quick to love, so quick to hate; so intrepid, and yet squealing with fright at he own shadow; so unrelated to the modern world, and yet so at -home in it; so lovable. so grotestlne, and so unaccountably attractive, As for the elehhant keepers, their • devotion to their charges is prover- • Hal, And that devotion ie returned. for never was any spoilt lady more possessive in her love than the elephant. Pflephants do, quite simply, fall in love, and as in Captivity they el,i+. t t :,reed, their eir immen e eapa- City for affection bas to nc trans- ferred front their urn t me Or young t-, some other al, set, fre- quently their beeper, or some smaller animal. Do They Forget? The truth of the saying that "an elephant never forgets' is some-. tore disputed by circus fedk, "Never" is p<rhaps too final a ward, hot undotthtedh• etetharts have loner memories, A remark- able story of an elephant's gratefnl tr.em ry i told by E. }I. tost,:,ek, concerning ins Aft'ean elephant, Lizzie. Once or tourLizzie fell ill witheo'd , always a dangerous ailment lunge beasts. No vet fottn, and in desperation Rr k sen for the local chemist. w e ` Ruth:darning Saunders in ":'t" -ser.' \'.''+en the chemist arrived- Lizzie ors in :. on and seemed to he. 1•;:ne. le oracle up a drattglit, • s! -e swa.!otyed, and in a day •• •-wo sive recovered. Pour years Iater the show re- l.: •, t'..e same town. and the ', runt in procession through t'•. street?. Among the crowds on 11: c^:r', s nosh the chemist. - 1-red'ateiy site came opposite Mtn Lizzie swung out of the pro- ceeion, rnslted at the chetniet with a "yank" of joy, wrapped her trunk round his arm, drew him close and gtsrled hound endear- freets. The Paragon Nir could she be persuaded to leave him for some time—and only then with many backward glances and affectionate chirrupings. If we examine this little story, we shah find that it proves a very high order or animal intelligence. Lizzie had previously seen the chemist only for a few minutes, when she was in great agony, and in no fit state. one would imagine, to distinguish one person from another. Yet, four years later, she could recognise in a crowd the man who had cured her. 3foreover, she had the sense to connect both the physic and the chemist with her recovery. This is not usual. Many animates, even highly in- telligent dogs, will connect not their cure. but their suffering, with the person who may happen to treat them; and should the strang- er come their way again, will treat him with marked aversion. But Bostock's Lizzie was a paragon among animals. Once when she mounted a tub in the menagerie to go through her tricks. her shoulder broke one of the flare lamps, The naphtha poured down on her, and in no time she was a mass of flames from neck to tail. "You Poor bear" Demented with pain, she plung- t! ed about the menagerie enclosure, which was tightly packed with people. The crowd panicked, and children were knocked down in all directions, But Lizzie, though wild with terror, took the utmost care not to tread on theme Bostock say's it was the most wonderful experience of his life to see the great beast stepping warily over the children's bodies as she .rushed to and fro trying to free herself from the flames. Gallons of oil were used to snob* her skin and Lizzie recovered. She lived for many years, the idol of her owner, When she died her skin wase 'stuffed" for the Swansea Iilusetsns, Museum, 'There are innumerable instances of the e x t r e m e care which elephants take not in injure those they are fotiel of. Here is ars incident that hap- pened one day at Olympia, the Landon circus, A woman trainer was putting the elephants through their tricks • when one of them k,st its footing and began to topple over. Precisely under its two -ton body stood the trainer. But even as it fell the elephant lifted a leg and very gently pushed the woman out of its way. Then it crashed exactly on the snot v; here she had been standing, The trainer got np unhurt, "Oh, You dear," she exclaimed, "yon poor dear, to save me like that!" •Elephants delight in performing pool share with the ehimpanze the distinction of being able to invent and rehearse new tricks them- selves. - Delight in Mischief They also delight in mischief, and are adepts at pulling up their stakes, undoing bolts, stealing and hiding keys, opening doors and windows,- and getting at forbidden stores of food. A frolicsome trio once raided a wine shop next door to their stable at night, and were found back at their pickets in the morning, bliss- fully drunk amidet a litter of broken bottles. \\'hire• elephants (which are not white hut pale grey) have been held sacred in the Fast from time immemorial, A Solid Treasury—Dwarfed by the Khazhen, or treasury building, of the lost city of Petra, Translordan, a party of British soldiers and their guides gaze at the magnificent building which was hewn from a rock cliff, In ancient times Traders from the Medi- terranean area and the East passed this way and also marvelled at the beauty of the Khazhen, "God Made It" Barnum, the famous American circus proprietor, was only able to procure one from the King of Siam after swearing a solemn oath to "love and honour the animal and protect it from misery." When the elephant arrived in New York, Barnum invited a party of journalists on to inspect it,- They were disappointed, and remarked that it was not so very white. after all. "Gentlemen," replied Barnum gravely-, "God made that white elephant. "But 1 assure you, had he been made by Mr, Bailey or myself, he would be as white as driven snow," In England, Lord George Sanger achieved a dazzlingly white elephant, with much less' trouble and expense, simply by using a few pails of whitewash. Planet Mercury . Tough Place To Live Our sun, they say, is an average star, There are many suns far larger and hotter, and many dull red and dying. The earth, they add, is an average planet. There are planets far larger and planets some- what smaller. The present arrange- ment seems to have been designed for the benefit of the average man. Perhaps that is why the sun, the sky and the earth seem so much in harmony when the sun is half- way on its annual journey at the spring equinox. The cosmic sys- tem fora few days is in balance, which in some mysterious way communicates itself to one who has found a good place in the sun. Just after the sun sank exactly M the west on March 21st the elusive little planet Mercury, red and angry, appeared low on the western horizon, One would not care for a place in the sun on this neighboring planet, On the side of Mercury which always faces the sun it is hot enough, they say, to melt lead, On the other side, the temperature is near absolute zero. Above Mercury was the brilliant planet Jupiter. One wouldn't care C ose Coll --Pte, Oda Caron clears out his Karean bunker which caved in when an enemy shelf landed too close for comfort. The concussion killed three rats inside the bunker, but Mortarman Caron was unhurt, for a place in the sun there either. The temperature is around minus 130 degrees centigrade, and the dark bands seen through a tele- scope are supposed to be "clouds of solid crystals or liquid drops of ammonia and other compounds, floating in a cold atmosphere of methane gas." Not an attractive climate! Interplanetary emigrants dissat- isfied with conditions on the earth, would do better to head for Mars, There is a little atmosphere on Mars, though much rarer than the air, and a small amount of water. The temperature ranges from minus 100 degrees centigrade up to the freezing point of water, It drops preciptously at night and rises swift- ly with the sun's rays. Snowcaps at the poles, waterways and vegeta- tion suggest possibilities for skiing, motorbeating and' gardening,' Birt even on Mars there would be no very good place to sit in the sun. One would be about 50,000,000 miles farther away from the sun, and at that distance it is calculated that the intensity of the sum's radiation is only four -ninths of what it is here, That would not be good enough in the early days of spring, when one needs nine -ninths of all the sun's radiation one can find in a good place in the sun. For a few days around the spring equirsox all peoples of the earth have an equal place in the sun. Moscow and Timbuktu, New York and New Delhi, Alaska and Pata- gonia have equal shares of day and night, But the warmth to be got from the sun, from poles to equator, varies so much that people more about to get a better place in tete sun. AIM when.a strong nation sets out to acquire a better place in rhe sun it may seriously upset the l::1- ance of all tike others, We leave seen it Happen recently in the case of tiermany, reaching out lira+ ort the line Berlin -Baghdad and later for the southern Ukraine, A Leo, r place in the sun for Russ'a 0i:, en obseeei,,n of the Czars, wbiel, ea, been 'r,herited by their successors in the kremlin. Constaninot:e in the old days, Turkey and the Straits now, the warmwater ports of Man- churia and Korea draw the Rus- sians as the sun draws the tides, This has been and is very. disturb- ing, But an clear day in early spring, when the sun is bright and the sky is blue* viewed from a sheltered nook in the sun, the Rus- sians seem least able to distied) the orderly course of the planets, ---Proms The New York Times. "A man r,r large ea'ibre, isn't ht'r'' "Yes, Ire's a big bore," Plant Fertilizers Away Back When Young f a r m e r s today learn scientific land management, includ- ing the proper use of plant foods, in school, in club work, or on the family farm. Your grandfathers often had to follow tise "by guess and by gosh" system, especially in the selection and use of fertilizers for crops. Guano from South America was one of the first fertilizers used by cotton planters and tobacco farmers in the Southeast, However, when used alone, guano nsade the crops run to stalks and leaves, as it is :sigh in nitrogen. So the farmers de- veloped various mixtures using guano as a base and adding other ingredients such as acid phosphate. Such mixtures were known as "manipulated guano," Back about 1860-1870, some farmers actually sold rights to make fertilizers according to their favorite "recipe," One such mixture was made up as follows: Recipe for One Ton 1, Take of stable or lot manure 1,000 lbs, to 1,000 lbs. of turf or muck, 2. 12 lbs, commercial saltpetre with 100 lbs, of slacked lime. 3. Two bushels of common salt, mixed well with half bushel of oak ashes. Ready for use in 18 days. Let it stand in the pen or put in barrels. Use 150 to 200 lbs, to the acre. Better than guano for cotton, corn, potatoes, or wheat. To prepare the fertilizer, build a pen well sheltered, and put in No. 1 one foot deep and level; then `add No. 2 one inch deep and level; then sprinkle No. 3 sufficient to cover: then begin again with No. 1, following as above. always end- ing with a layer of No. 1. BEAT HIM EASY Primo Camera's reputation es a heavyweight boxer is slightly tar- nished, arnished, hut he's making a big come- back as a wrestler — and he is still a source of joy to visiting re- porters, When he 'arrived on the Coast recently, for example, a scribe asked hint, "I3ow do you like Los Angeles?" Primo flexed his muscles and answered confid- ently, "I pin him to the mat in two minutes." eeeeespeeseeeePeeSeereeeeleseeneresteetseeesefeeeestfeeeeee gest Master Of Mystery Had Strange Secret In Own Life "Un a moonlit night in the 1450' John :Everett Millais, the painter, was` walking hustle from a party with two friends. They were sud- denly arrested by a piercing scream from the garden of a villa close at hand, "An iron gate leading to the gar- den was dashed open, and from it came the figure of a Young and very beautiful woman dressed in flowing white robes."On corning up to the three young men she paused for a mo- ment iu an attitude of supplication 'and terror, Then, suddenly seeming to recollect herself, she moved on and vanished in the shadows, "One of Millais' companions dashed after her; but although the others waited for his return, they did not see hint again that night." That is not fiction, hot an epi- sode from real life. The young man who dashed after the lady in dist- ress was Wilkie Collins. A few years later Ise wrote: "'The Woman in White," a novel which has an unassailable place among the world's great mystery stories. But he left behind hint a mys- tery that will probably never be solved, although, if the evidence is to be accepted,. it played a leading part in his life—the mystery of the real Woman in White. The Other Life Kenneth Robinson's recently published "Wilkie Collins—a Bio- graphy" gives us all the known facts about Wilkie Collins, and there are plenty of them. As a public figure, a best-selling novel- ist, the close friend of Dickens, his life is an open book. But behind all this there was another life, as shrouded in mist and secrecy as any of the strange tales he wrote. Let us look first at what we know of the obstinate, short-sight- ed, black -coated little man, with his bulging forehead. He was born in 1824, the son of 'William Collins, a well-known art- ist, He painted a few pictures him- self, and one was hung in the Aca- demy, 1 -Ie went into business, read law, and was called to the Bar, But after publishing a life of his father and an historical novel call- ed "Antonin," he settled for liter- ature as a career, and never look- ed back. He had a fondness for amateur theatricals, and it was this that brought hint into contact with Charles Dickens, who was then al- ready famous, not only as a novel- ist but as the editor of "Household Words," Collins became a regular contributor. Dickens and he travelled abroad together. They collaborated on stories for the special Christmas numbers of "Household Words," and on a play entitled "The Frozen Deep," in which they both acted. Their friendship, which lasted until Dickens' deaths, was essentially one of fellow -craftsmen, each of whom had something to teach the other, For Dickens, men and women were what mattered in a story, but for Collins, in Isis early days, the emphasis was on plot. He was a born weaver of plots, a master of the art of story -tell- ing, But Isis early efforts were only moderately successful—partly, per-. :saps, because there was too nsuch plot and too little character, but also because of his over -indulgence in his queer taste for the strange, the sinister, the • macabre. It was Dickens who taught him to leaven horror with humanity, in 1859 Dickens started a new magazine called "All tlse Year Round"; and in 1860 there appear- ed in it the opening instalment of a serial containing the following lines: "There, in the middle of the broad, bright highroad—there, as if it had at that moment sprung out of the earth or dropped from s, vise heavens—stood the figure of solitary woman, dressed from lies to foot l white garments, her face bent in grave inquiry on mime, her hand pointing to the dark cloud over London, as I facets her , "Dead of Night" "I was far too startled by the suddenness with which this extra- ordinary apparition stood before me, in the dead of night, and In that lonely place, to ask what she wanted. The strange woman spoke first. 'Is that the road to London?' she said." "The Wonsan in White!" This was the passage, based on Collins' own dramatic experience, which riveted the attention of countless readers, causing the sales of the paper to go rocketing up and later making the book the world best- seller ft hbeen si, The complexas plotaver is concnceerned with a conspiracy to obtain a legacy by substituting one woman for an- other, making use of a private mental asylum. But in the end it is not the plot that matters, but the telling of the tale, the atmosphere with which Collins invests it; above all, the characters, Collins wrote over twenty novels, most of thein "three -deckers, and five volumes of short stories; but in these days only two of his works are read or renumbered. They tower head and shoulders above the rest --first "The Woman in White," and then (eight years later) "The Moonstone," which T. 5. Eliot has described as "the first, the longest, and the hest of mod- ern English detective novels," "The Moonstone" is certainly long, and full of what now seem' like stock ingredients -- the huge, uncanny diamond looted from an Indians temple, that disappears frotn an English country house; the Iridian jugglers in the neighbour- hood; the hunchbacked maid with a prison record; tlse loyal old fain- ily retainer and tlse bluff detective, who grows roses in his spare time. All old stuff now, but that is be- cause Collins has had so many imi- tators, IIs was forced to dictate a great part of "The Moonstone." During tlse latter part of his life he suffer - kind of gout that affected his eyes. ed agonies from rheumatism and a To dull the pain he took laudanum, an opium preparation, increasing the quantity until he was taking enough to kill half -a -dozen peogle at a single dose. So much for what we know — but what of that other life?' Wilkie Collins never married. fIe had a lifelong love affair with a widowed woman, Caroline Graves. When it had lasted ten years she Left him and married another man. Nobody Knows Collins took another mistress, by whom he had three children, Then Caroline returned to him, and con- tinued to live with him, always as b1889.ars, Graves, until his death in Those are the bare, mysterious facts. What happened? How did it work out? Why did they never marry? We do not know. Collin? intimate friends seem to have been convinced, presumably for good reasons, that Caroline Graves was the original Woman in White, But Collins never said. He never told what happened on that dram- atic night when he dashed away from his friend, Millais, or what happened afterwards, The queer, enigmatic Iittle man, the Master of Mystery, has been wonderfully successful in maintaining the Mys- tery of Wilkie Collins, Reactions to a Woman's New Hat Her Mother; "Oh, what a lovely hat l" Her Father: "You mean to say you call that thing a hat?' Her Husband: "I -Tow much did it cost?" cscmcsmuctmmums,s1Mtaso New Wings For Britain --The huge, new Britannia airliner takes shape at the Bristol Airplane Com- pany's plant in Fitton, England, First of 25 of the 107 -passenger ships on order for British Airways, it will have a wingspan of 140 feet, will be 114 feet long, and 38 feet 8 inches high. Designed to cruise at 370'mites-per.hour the big ship will cost $1,540,000.