Lord Metcalfe on a Camel when a Boy.
Charles Metcalfe, "first and last Lord Metcalfe," to whose care were successively intrusted the three greatest dependencies of the British crown, India, Jamaica, and Canada, and who died in 1846, was sent to Eton when eleven years old. His biographer relates,[255] that "it is on record, and on very sufficient authority, that he was once seen riding on a camel. 'I heard the boys shouting,' said Dr Goodall, many years afterwards, 'and went out and saw young Metcalfe riding on a camel; so you see he was always orientally inclined.'" This anecdote will serve as a comrade to that told by Mr Foss, in his "Lives of the Justices of England," of Chief-Baron Pollock. When a lad, one of his schoolmasters, fretted by the boyish energy and exuberant spirits of his scholar, said petulantly, "You will live to be hanged." The old gentleman lived to see his pupil Lord Chief-Baron, and, not a little proud of his great scholar, said, "I always said he would occupy an elevated position."
STAGS AND GIRAFFE.
The deer family is rather numerous, and found in many different parts of the world. Reindeers abound in some parts even of Spitzbergen, and with musk oxen can find their food even under the winter snows of the Parry Islands. The wapiti and heavy large-headed elk or moose, retreat before the advancing civilisation of North America. The Indian mountains and plains have noble races of deer. No species, however, is more celebrated than our red deer. The giraffe is closely allied to the stag family. The Arabs name it the seraph, and indeed, that is the origin of its now best-known English name. Visitors should beware of going too near the male, for we have seen the dent made by one of the giraffe's bony knobs on a pannel close to its stall. We have heard of a young lady, who entered the garden one of those summer days when straw bonnets had great bunches of ripe barley mingled with artificial poppies as an ornament, and, going too near the lofty pallisade, found to her confusion and terror that the long lithe tongue of the giraffe had whisked off her Leghorn, flowers and all, and had begun leisurely to munch it with somewhat of the same gusto with which it would have eaten the branch of a graceful mimosa.