AN ELEPHANT'S ESCAPADE.

Taranaki Herald, Volume LV, Issue 13946, 29 April 1909, Page 4

AN ELEPHANT'S ESCAPADE.

Residents in Botany Rond, near the Lakeside Woplscouring Works, Sydney, trere roused from their sleep nbont 6 j'clock ono morning recently by the sound of smashing timber and buildings boing Inirledr with violence to Mother Earth. Above tho noise of wreckage strange tiumpetings rose, md startled people rushed out of doors in sleeping garb in anticipation of the Crack of Doom being in the vicinity. No doom was to Le found, but a bolted elephant was providing crack with a lavish trunk. This Jumbo earns his living as a side issue in a circus, but on that morning'he was takGn from the romance of tho tents and the comfort uf the sawdust to._drag a wagon laden with waste material through the gloom af. .the sleeping city out to Botany. Whether, the indignity of the load annoyed him or, as has been advanced, a gun shot scared him, is not sertain, but the fact is demonstrable that ho became tirimanageable. Had h.e kept to the roadwny all might have been well, but he made a dash at n terrace of houses. Ho banged through a fence and nearly knocked out ; one lide of a weatherrboard cottage, 'then he set off through the near-by, back yards, leaving behind him a trail of Washed fences and overturned outhouses. Finally, he tore through the clividing fence of the Lakeside Wooljconring Works, and espipd the nightwatchman. That worthy, from all accounts, did not stand upon tlie order of his but .went— unobtrusively, bnt with much speed. Yet, my lord tho elephant had seen him, and the onlookers were afforded the strange spectacle of a man streaking for the rising snh pursued by several tons of enraged elephant, and a bounding wagon. En- route to the sun-rise the leviathan brought up in the woolscouring works, where; he parted company-, with his wagon; His attendant, who had pluckily attended on his charge as well as he could, there captured the escaped animal, and, quietening him, conducted him back to the place whence he had come, subdued and very disreputable. ! ■■'■■;■""