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New Zealand Mail, Issue 858, 10 August 1888, Page 1

The fact that all persons are not suitable to be superintendents of orphan asylums was amusingly illustrated by a speaker at a recent Dunedin banquet in the following apologue“ There was once an elephant—-

female elephant —going out for an afternoon’s walk, and in the course of her rambles this animal crossed a cornfield. In this cornfield there was a partridge, and this partridge had got some small young ones. The elephant, beiDg an observer of nature at large, suddenly observed that she had put her foot on some soft substance, so she looked down and observed that she had crushed the partridge. So she took lip the somewhat faded and tattered remains in her trunk and looked at them. Then she said to herself, ‘This is the parent bird ; it’s no3t must be somewhere in the district, and it is without any protector. The brood is without a mother —l’ll be its mother !’ and she immediately sat down on the brood. (Great laughter.) The moral of that story (remarked the.speaker) is that it is not everybody who is qualified to superintend an orphan asylum.”