98 WILD LIFE AMONGST BEASTIES the European, being rank in flavour, though the natives find no disadvantage in the fact. And how welcome fresh meat is after the continued meals emerging from tins laboriously brought from Chicago or France !

I have often imagined the expression of an English cook were she asked to produce dishes of equal excellence to those of Abid, with a kitchen range of such simplicity as his. True, he made an occasional mistake, as when he served a whole tin of " pate de foie gras " hot and oily ! But he made up for such lapses by his application in catching fish in the pools, where the fickle river had crowded them. The crocodile is mainly a fish -eater ; thousands of cranes and storks tread the shallows ; fish-eagles and kingfishers dart into the depths ; and the marvel is that, even in their initial multitudes, a single fish remains in each circumscribed home to see the first flush of summer torrents from the hills.

The fish which he succeeded in taking did not equal in flavour the Dover sole. Its appearance was that of a mustachioed dogfish, black in colour, on whose enormous head an elephant had placed its foot. The body constituted only one-half of its length, and was built vertically ; while the evillooking head, fringed round the mouth with eight fleshy tentacles, was flat. Others, which were entirely uneatable, and also tentacled, almost resembled the eel, with a dorsal fin the whole length of the body.

It is said that some classes of fish—though I saw