We ought always to be useful, and do good to everybody. I used to think that we ought always to improve our minds, and I think so some now, though I have got into dreadful difficulties all through improving my mind. But I am not going to be discouraged. I tried to be useful the other day, and do good to the heathen in distant lands, and you wouldn\'t believe what trouble it made. There are some people who would never do good again if they had got into the trouble that I got into; but the proverb says that if at first you don\'t succeed, cry, cry again; and there was lots of crying, I can tell you, over our rhinoceros, that we thought was going to do so much good.

It all happened because Aunt Eliza was staying at our house. She had a Sunday-school one afternoon, and Tom McGinnis and I were the scholars, and she told us about a boy that got up a panorama about the Pilgrim\'s Progress all by himself, and let people see it for ten cents apiece, and made ten dollars, and sent it to the missionaries, and they took it and educated mornahundred little heathens[Pg 118] with it, and how nice it would be if you dear boys would go and do likewise and now we\'ll sing "Hold the Fort."

Well, Tom and I thought about it, and we said we\'d get up a menagerie, and we\'d take turns playing animals, and we\'d let folks see it for ten cents apiece, and make a lot of money, and do ever so much good.

We got a book full of pictures of animals, and we made skins out of cloth to go all over us, so that we\'d look just like animals when we had them on. We had a lion\'s and a tiger\'s and a bear\'s and a rhinoceros\'s skin, besides a whole lot of others. As fast as we got the skins made, we hung them up in a corner of the barn where nobody would see them. The way we made them was to show the pictures to mother and to Aunt Eliza, and they did the cutting out and the sewing, and Sue she painted the[Pg 119] stripes on the tiger, and the fancy touches on the other animals.

Our rhinoceros was the best animal we had. The rhinoceros is a lovely animal when he\'s alive. He is almost as big as an elephant, and he has a skin that is so thick that you can\'t shoot a bullet through it unless you hit it in a place that is a little softer than the other places. He has a horn on the end of his nose, and he can toss a tiger with it till the tiger feels sick, and says he won\'t play any more. The rhinoceros lives in Africa, and he would toss \'most all the natives if it wasn\'t that they fasten an India-rubber ball[Pg 120] on the end of his horn, so that when he tries to toss anybody, the horn doesn\'t hurt, and after a while the rhinoceros gets discouraged, and says, "Oh, well, what\'s the good anyhow?" and goes away into the forest. At least this is what Mr. Travers says,............