TAME HYÆNA.
When the traveller, Ignatius Pallme, was at Kordofan, he saw in the court of a house at Lobeid, a hyæna running about quite domesticated. The children of the proprietor tamed it, took the meat thrown to it for food out of its jaws, and put their hands even to its throat without receiving the slightest injury. When the family sat down to dinner in the open air, the animal approached the table, and snapped up the pieces that were thrown to it, like a dog. A full-grown hyæna and her two cubs, on another occasion, were brought to our traveller for sale; the latter were carried in arms, as you might carry a lamb, and were not even muzzled. The old one, it is true, had a rope round her snout, but she had been led a distance of twelve miles by one man without offering the least resistance. The Africans do not even reckon the hyæna among the wild beasts of their country, for they are not afraid of it.
NOVEL TRAVELLING CARRIAGE.
In 1838, a carriage was built for a gentleman at Kensington, which, for completeness, equalled Sir Samuel Morland's celebrated cooking-carriage, of the seventeenth century. It was divided into two apartments, an anti-room, and a drawing-room and bed-chamber with every comfort. The anti-room contained a table, drawers, and culinary utensils; and the drawing-room was furnished with sofas, sofa-bedstead, six chairs, table, cupboards, and a chandelier for nine lights; a stove and fuel. The length of the carriage was twenty-nine feet, and the breadth nine feet; and the length of the drawing-room twenty-feet. The whole weighed two tons and a half.
ENEMIES OF THE OSTRICH.
The ostrich would appear to be a bird of many enemies, from the following statement in Sir J. E. Alexander's narrative of his Expedition of Discovery in South Africa:
"According to native testimony, the male ostrich sits on the nest (which is merely a hollow place scooped out in the sand) during the night, the better to defend the eggs from jackals and other nocturnal plunderers. Towards morning, he brummels, or utters a grumbling sound, for the female to come and take his place; and she sits on the eggs during the cool of the morning and evening. In the middle of the day, the pair, leaving the eggs in charge of the sun, and 'forgetting that the foot may crush them, or the wild beast break them,' employ themselves in feeding off the tops of bushes in the plain near the nest. Looking aloft at this time of day, a white Egyptian vulture may be seen, soaring in mid-air, with a large stone between his talons. Having carefully surveyed the ground below him, he suddenly lets fall the stone, and then follows it in rapid descent. Let the hunter run to the spot, and he will find a nest of, probably, a score of eggs, (each equal in size to twenty-four hen's eggs,) some of them broken by the vulture. The jackal, too, is said to roll the eggs together to break them; and the hyæna pushes them off with his nose, to bury them at a distance."