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-36-

to go through the motions of sweeping before he understood.

At the nearby market, Tanah Djawah, Davis brought a sea eagle and a Felis minuta cat. The cat is a dumpling, about half grown and perfectly tame. It weighs nothing, feels like a bunch of feathers in one's hand, and dances about and plays like a house kitten. It is spotted like a tiny leopard, and has the sweetest little face with black and white markings on a tawny ground.

Shortly after lunch a Malay appeared with a baby tiger. It is only a few weeks old, just a milkling, and has to be fed on a bottle. It is a marvelous little cat, a perfect miniature tiger. Baby lions do not look particularly like lions. When they are first born they are spotted, and the shape of the head and face differ from a full-grown lion. But the tiger cub is striped and colored like a mature animal[[strikethrough]] s [[/strikethrough]], and as he staggers around on his clumsy paws, and yells through his bristly whiskers, he is too absurd for words. He is apparently half starved, and gulps his milk down greedily.

We had another escape today, this time a pig-tailed macaque that we did not particularly want. It was given us as a present, but vanished wildly over the horizon, with our whole crowd in ineffectual pursuit.

March 24 -

To-day was given over, for my part, to nursing the two little cats. Felis minuta eats meat, but the tiger does not even notice it. Both get milk from a bottle, and the take turns in screaming. The tiger woke the whole camp up at three in the morning, was sick to his tummy, and most disturbing.

Nothing of great interest happened, and the only new specimen was a hoopoe that cannot stand up.

March 25 -

The tiger still cries, but not so much. He gave us a bad night, and we finally had to put him in another room, farther away from us. A kingfisher died yesterday, and the hoopoe died today, and Bill feels discouraged.

Early in the afternoon a man arrived bringing one dove. We told him we wanted bigger and better animals, so a little later he rode up on a bicycle with a big siamang hanging on his shoulders. It had something the matter with its hind legs, so we did not buy it. It also had a passion for eating paper instead of biscuits, and we were a bit leery about buying anything that had been on such a diet for any length of time.

Escapes come in threes, I suppose. Two of the opossums that we gave Dr. Coenraad for the Siantar Zoo escaped last night. Rather annoying, after paying freight on them, and nursing them half-way round the world.

March 26 -

We sent Gaddi and Samsoedin, a native buyer of animals,

Transcription Notes:
*animals the s is crossed out