Round the Block: An American Novel

by John Bell Bouton

The three bachelors concurred in the opinion that the idea was a good one; but Marcus Wilkeson suggested that the field was too large.

"I thought you would like the general proposition," said Tiffles. "But, bless you, Mark! I don't mean to paint the whole continent, from stem to stern, so to speak; only the undiscovered part of Central Africa--say from Cape Guardafui on the east to the Bight of Benin on the west."

"But how the deuce," asked Matthew Maltboy, "are you, or anybody else, going to paint what has not been discovered?"

Tiffles could hardly suppress a smile at the simplicity of the question. "Why," said he, "that's easy enough. Don't all the geographers tell us that the interior of Africa is made up, so far as known, of alternate deserts and jungles, like the patches on a coverlet? Very well. I conform to this general principle of the continent. I put half of the canvas in desert, and the rest in jungle, and I can't be far out of the way. Take the idea?"

"Perfectly," said Matthew Maltboy; "but if you have nothing but alternate, deserts and jungles, it strikes me your panorama will be a little monotonous. Perhaps I am wrong." (Maltboy always offered suggestions timidly.)

"I have thought of that, and guarded against it. I shall fill the jungles with animated life--elephants, lions, tigers, panthers, leopards, rhinoceroses, hippopotamuses, giraffes, zebras, crocodiles, boa constrictors, and other specimens of natural history indigenous to that delightful region."

"Good!" cried Overtop; "and if you will take a hint from me, you will show your elephants in the act of being caught by natives, or engaged in combats with each other; your lions fighting your tigers or your rhinoceroses; your hippopotamuses engaged in death struggles with your crocodiles; and your boa constrictors gobbling down your natives--or, if that is objectionable on the score of humanity, your monkeys."

"Thank you for the hint; but the expense, and the necessity of completing the panorama at an early day, put it out of the question. To paint accurate representations of these animals engaged in their innocent sports, would occupy the time of a first-class artist for months, and cost an enormous sum."

"Ah, I see," interrupted Overtop, who liked to show that he snatched the meaning; "you will put your animals in recumbent attitudes--sleeping, perhaps, in the depth of jungles, shaded from the fierce rays of the equatorial sun."

"You have guessed it," said Tiffles, with a broad smile. "Most of them will be just there--out of sight. The others will be suggested rather than introduced. Elephants will be signified by their trunks appearing above the tops of the dense undergrowth. Lions, tigers, and other quadrupeds, by the tips of their tails. A boa constrictor will be expressed by a head, a coil, and a bit of tail showing at intervals. The one horn of the rhinoceros will always tell where he is. I shall have two small lakes (they are scarce in Africa) for my hippopotamuses and crocodiles. If they exhibit only small portions of their heads above the surface, that is not my fault. It is the nature of the beasts, you know."