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It was delightful to see the Urchin endeavor to bring some sense of order into this amazing place by his classification of the strange sights that surrounded him. He would not confess himself staggered by anything. At his first glimpse of the emu he cried ecstatic, “Look, there’s a–,” and paused, not knowing what on earth to call it. Then rapidly to cover up his ignorance he pointed confidently to a somewhat similar fowl and said sagely, “And there’s another!” The curious moth-eaten and shabby appearance that captive camels always exhibit was accurately recorded in his addressing one of them as “poor old horsie.” And after watching the llamas in silence, when he saw them nibble at some grass he was satisfied. “Moo-cow,” he stated positively, and turned away. The bears did not seem to interest him until he was reminded of Goldylocks. Then he remembered the pictures of the bears in that story and began to take stock of them.

The Zoo is a pleasant place to wander on a Sunday afternoon. The willow trees, down by the brook where the otters were plunging, were a cloud of delicate green. Shrubs everywhere were bursting into bud. The Tasmanian devils those odd little swine that look like small pigs in a high fever, were lying sprawled out, belly to the sun-warmed earth, in the same whimsical posture that dogs adopt when trying to express how jolly they feel. The Urchin’s curators were at a loss to know what the Tasmanian devils were and at first were led astray by a sign on a tree in the devils’ inclosure. “Look, they’re Norway maples,” cried one curator. In the same way we thought at first that a llama was a Chinese ginkgo. These errors lead to a decent humility.

There is something about a Zoo that always makes one hungry, so we sat on a bench in the sun, watched the stately swans ruffling like square-rigged ships on the sparkling pond, and ate biscuits, while the Urchin was given a mandate over some very small morsels. He was much entertained by the monkeys in the open-air cages. In the upper story of one cage a lady baboon was embracing an urchin of her own, while underneath her husband was turning over a pile of straw in a persistent search for small deer. It was a sad day for the monkeys at the Zoo when the rule was made that no peanuts can be brought into the park. I should have thought that peanuts were an inalienable right for captive monkeys. The order posted everywhere that one must not give the animals tobacco seems almost unnecessary nowadays, with the weed at present prices. The Urchin was greatly interested in the baboon rummaging in his straw. “Mokey kicking the grass away,” he observed thoughtfully.

Down in the grizzly-bear pit one of the bears squatted himself in the pool and sat there, grinning complacently at the crowd. We explained that the bear was taking a bath. This presented a familiar train of thought to the Urchin and he watched the grizzly climb out of his tank and scatter the water over the stone floor. As we walked away the Urchin observed thoughtfully, “He’s dying.” This somewhat shocked the curators, who did not know that their offspring had even heard of death. “What does he mean?” we asked ourselves. “He’s dying,” repeated the Urchin in a tone of happy conviction. Then the explanation struck us. “He’s drying!” “Quite right,” we said. “After his bath he has to dry himself.”

We went home on a crowded Girard Avenue car, thinking impatiently that it will be some time before we can read “The Jungle Book” to the Urchin. In the summer, when the elephants take their bath outdoors, we’ll go again. And the last thing the Urchin said that night as he fell asleep was, “Mokey kicking the grass away.”