5.—ONE SIDE OF THE HIDE IN PLACE.
Ropes were fastened to one side of Tip's skin, and it was hauled up against the manikin and fitted around the body. Then it was lowered back into the tub again, and more excelsior added where the skin hung loose, or bits cut away to make room for the clumsy dimples in the elephant's hide. This was repeated over and over again, until the men were satisfied with the fit of the final covering for their specimen. But, like good tailors, they were not easily satisfied, and the patient manikin had to have its new coat "tried on" many, many times before it was ready to have the seams sewed up for good. Both sides had to be treated in this way, and then the head, which, of course, needed more fitting and alterations than the sides.
But it was finally finished, and the last work on the manikin was then done. The great body with its woolly coat of excelsior was hidden under a thin layer of modelling clay. This was spread over evenly and worked down smooth with the men's hands; the body, the legs, the head, the trunk, and even the tail were treated to this last coat, and at a little distance Tip looked very natural, except for the lack of eyes and soles for his feet. Again the big pieces of hide were hauled up out of the tan liquor, and again they were fitted to the manikin. Here and there a few final alterations were necessary, and then the body was ready to be sewed into its new coat forever.
Clumsy seamstresses these workmen would have made if fine linen and sewing-silk had been their materials, but with copper wire, and brad-awls to punch the needle-holes, they managed to make fully as strong, if not as neat, seams as the cleverest dressmakers. The two sides of the skin were hauled up and matched together at the top of the elephant's back. Then, with their clumsy needles and their wire thread, the workmen climbed up on top of the manikin, and sewed together the long seam where the knives of the skinners had opened the hide. Other seams down the back of the legs and under the elephant's belly were sewed up in this way, and Tip's hide once more held an elephant, although a very different kind of an elephant from that it was intended to cover. The skin of the head was put on in the same way, and the trunk-covering was sewed over the padded plank in a most natural position. Two large eyes of glass were fastened into the sockets, and Tip was put away to dry out.
6.—"TIP" RESTORED.
Had any one who did not know the secrets of the taxidermist come upon the elephant a few days later, he would have thought he had seen a ghost—and the ghost of the famous white elephant, too, at that. There stood Tip, to be sure, but all white. The effect of the chemicals in which his skin had soaked so long had been to bleach the hide to a streaky gray that looked almost ghostly. But the workmen expected this, and they soon altered the disguise. They went over to the zoo in the Park with big buckets of paint, and mixed a lot of it to match the skin of Tom, another elephant there, whose hide is almost exactly the same color as was Tip's. Then they painted the stuffed elephant from trunk to tail, and varnished over the paint, covering up all the stitches they had taken in his hide, and giving him once more the appearance of the familiar old friend on whose broad back the children used to ride about the circus ring until he got too ugly to be safe.
Never again will Tip attack his keepers. Behind a railing he stands in the museum, as harmless as old Jumbo, whose skeleton stands nearby, but still as natural as in life. On his label one reads,
ASIATIC ELEPHANT,
followed by a brief history of his twelve years' experience in America, his death and restoration. His skeleton will be mounted by the museum experts, and will stand at the side of the stuffed hide.