old kerosine tins, fight like demons. Goats sit up and strike with their cloven
hoofs, and butt and stab with their horns. The silly sheep canter gaily to the
battle, deliver thundering blows on one another's foreheads, and then retire and
charge once more. The impact of their horny foreheads is sufficient to reduce a
man's hand to a shapeless pulp, should it find its way between the combatants'
skulls. Tigers box like pugilists, and bite like French school-boys; and buffaloes
fight clumsily, violently, and vindictively, after the manner of their kind.
The natives of India have an ingenious theory, whereby they account for the
existence of that ungainly fowl, the water-buffalo,—a fact in natural history,
which certainly seems to call for some explanation. The High Gods, they say,
when creating all things, made also the cow, the highest of the beasts that perish.
This the devil beheld, and, in futile emulation, striving to outdo the work of the
High Ones, he imitated their creation, and produced the water-buffalo! Every
one who knows this brute, must admit that the Indian theory bears on its face the
imprint of truth; for a more detestable beast of the field does not exist, and it
would be difficult, for any one less skilled in evil than His Satanic Majesty, to
have conceived the idea of so diabolical an animal. In the Malay Peninsula, its
principal functions would appear to be stamping bridle-paths into quagmires;
dragging unwieldy lumbering carts, and thereby frightening horses into fits;
tugging and frequently running away with, all manner of primitive ploughs and
sledges; and humiliating as publicly as possible, any white man that it does not
gore. It seems to cherish a peculiar spite against all Europeans; for a buffalo, that
is as mild as a lamb with the most unattractive native, cannot be brought to
tolerate the proximity of the most refined, and least repulsive of white men.
Which one is there amongst us, who does not bear a grudge against the water-
buffalo as a class, and against some one black or pink bully in particular? Which
of us is there, who has not passed moments in the company of these brutes, such
as might well 'score years from a strong man's life'? Some of us have been gored
by the brutes, and most of us, who have pursued the crafty snipe bird in his
native pâdi swamps, have put in various mauvais quarts d'heure, with some of
these sullenly vindictive animals mouching after us, much in the way that a
gendarme pursues a gamin. Then has entered upon the scene a Delivering Angel,
in the shape of a very small, very muddy, very naked child of exceedingly tender
years. This tiny deus ex machina has straightway tackled the angry monster, with
all the fearlessness of a child, has struck it twice in the face, in a most business-
like manner, has piped 'Diam! Diam!'[8]—which sounds like a curse word,—in a
furious voice, and finally has hooked his finger into the beast's nose ring, and has
led it away reluctant, and crestfallen, but unresisting. Most of us, I say, have