Mr. Lumley was so good as to join our circle; and having been given the word elephant, he mentioned a laughable anecdote of a man who took hold of an elephant’s tail lately in the streets of London. The animal was so displeased by this indignity, that he turned suddenly round, and grasping the man with his trunk, placed him against the iron rails where he kept him prisoner for some time. The keeper at last prevailed on the elephant to let the offender go, but not till after he had received some hard squeezes, for which he complained to a magistrate, who of course gave him no redress, as he was the first aggressor.
Mr. L. also told us that a friend of his in India, when riding on an elephant through a rice field, observed that the sagacious creature plucked a considerable quantity of the ears and carried them behind his trunk till the party stopped, when he ate them at leisure.
_21st._--The expected thaw arrived--yesterday was odious, half snow, half rain, and everything dirty and dreary. My uncle and Frederick went this afternoon to the poor man’s garden, where you know we saw the carrots raised up by the little icy pillars; but this thaw has made the roads so wet, that I could not possibly go with them.
Frederick tells me that all the fairy colonnades which supported the earth about the carrots are now melted, the earth has fallen down, and the tops of the roots are to be seen, quite bare, but above the ground, and appearing as if they had been half pulled up by hand.
I asked my uncle if frost pushes up any other kind of root in that way,--and he said that these columns have a quite different effect on fibrous roots, particularly the grasses. In consequence of the strong matting together of their roots, a whole piece of sward between two cracks is sometimes lifted up by these pillars, so as to separate it from the earth underneath. When the columns dissolve, the sward sinks into its former place, and the earth, which has been loosened and minutely divided by the frozen columns, affords a fine bed for the roots to strike into, so that it is rather an advantage than an injury to them to have been thus loosened. After the frost is melted, he says, he has seen patches of the sward lifted up with nearly as much ease as if they had been separated by a parting-spade.