"Therefore, when men came with ropes," said Mahmoud, "I made no resistance, but lay down of my own accord and suffered them to bind me. Thereupon the gruff man opened his black bag and took therefrom sundry bright knives and needles; also some bottles and strips of gauze. Though his voice was gruff, I found his touch most soft and gentle. First, he bathed my wounds with some sweet-smelling stuff, and then, with a keen knife—so keen was it that I knew not when it touched me, though it brought streams of blood—the man pared away the diseased skin. I confess that the gruff man's next act puzzled me somewhat at first. While his helpers held my trunk out straight, ever and anon bathing it with a soothing liquid, he washed with great care the thin, tender skin under my forelegs. A sharp pain, at which I made no outcry, however, in the same region, caused me to turn my eyes in that direction. The gruff man, with another very sharp knife, was taking from my legs narrow strips of the living skin and laying them, one after another, on the raw flesh of my trunk. Ere long the wounds were all covered, and when strips of cloth had been bound about them, holding them fast, the ropes were taken from me, and I was permitted to rise. From that day all my pain ceased, and soon only the scars which thou hast seen, O Light of my Life, remained as a witness of the merciful deed of the gruff man with the yellow hair and beard."
"Remarkable! Most remarkable!"
This time when the little Limping Boy turned at the interruption, he saw the Princess coming from the shrubbery, eagerly dragging after her by the hand a large man in whose yellow hair and beard there were some streaks of gray.
"Oh, Toots!" called out the Princess, as they approached the door of the Elephant House, "here's papa. We heard your translation of Mahmoud's story, and it's wonderful. I told papa you could do it, but he wouldn't believe it till his own ears convinced him."
"And so you're Toots," said the Princess' father. "My little daughter says that you translate the talk of the animals. Hum, ha, where did you get that story about the elephant skin-grafting you've just been telling?"
"Why, papa," said the Princess, reproachfully, "he got it from Mahmoud."
"Hum, ha," grunted the large man to himself, "the boy got it from the Keeper—probably the same one that took me out to Bridgeport for that case in Barnum's menagerie. Hum, ha, let's see, that was six years ago last winter. Hum, ha." And the large man looked sharply at Toots.
"My little daughter calls you 'Toots'; what's your real name?"