A CROCODILE AT LARGE.

Globe, Volume XXII, Issue 2118, 7 December 1880, Page 3

A CROCODILE AT LARGE.

Some six weeks ago (says a home paper) a lively young crocodile contrived one night to effect his escape from Joseph* Cboikowa’s travelling menagerie, then exhibiting at Kusohwarda, and all the efforts made to discover its hiding p’aco in the neighboring brooks and ponds proving fruitless, its proprietress, after three days’ search, gave it up as irretrievably lost, and departed on her further professional rounds. A month later the smith at Salnau, a village not far from Kusohwarda, was strolling home towards evening through the rain, when he suddenly espied, lying in a huge puddle on the high road, what he at first took to bo a drunken man, prostrate and helpless. Upon wading into the mud with the charitable intention of extricating the recumbent one from so miry a bed, he perceived, to his astonishment, that the object of his solicitude was the missing crocodile. Nothing daunted, ho fastened a rope round the saurian’s scaly body behind its shoulders, and led it along till he met a cart, into which, with the assistance of the driver, he managed to lift it. The crocodile made no resistance, but followed its captor as meekly as though it had been a tame dog tied to a string. On subsequent examination it was found to have increased in size and weight during its spell of liberty, and to be, for a crocodile, in excellent health and spirits. What it had fed upon while roaming about the country, and hew it had kept out the cold during the chilly nights of May and June, are still mysteries to its owner, who has joyfully recovered possession of her truant.