Flagged

The Pennsylvania Game Commission vouched for this story: On the track ahead of his engine, Engineer John Staplcton of the Philadelphia & Reading R. R. saw something fluttering, flopping. He stopped the train, climbed out, perceived it was a hen woodcock broken-winging to save her chicks who were between the rails.

Fiend

In The Bronx, N. Y., Mrs. Vincent Wood last week let a delivery-boy take her pedigreed black-&-white collie Frixie for an airing. Frixie ran away from the boy who, too frightened to report to Mrs. Wood, stayed in hiding. Four days later Frixie's body was found. Some fiend had beaten Frixie, poisoned him, thrown him on a fire, then put the charred body in a laundry sack, cast it into a gutter. Mr. Wood, a wholesale milliner, offered $50 reward for the fiend's capture.

Rare Picture

Fleet and shy is the okapi, member of the giraffe family and denizen only of Ituri Forest in the Belgian Congo. Okapi have been captured, but never photographed in their native environment, which is one of the most dense jungles known to man. Distinctive feature of the okapi is its striped hindquarters.* Therefore when Explorer Cornelius P. Bezuidenhout brought back from the Ituri section closeup pictures of the jungle okapi, Illustrated London News not only featured his photographs and ran a long story by him, but used a closeup rear-view of a female okapi as its full-page frontispiece last fortnight (see cut).

Explorer Bezuidenhout explained he had accomplished his feat by disguising himself as a wild pig, going about grunting. Once a male okapi-- who failed to be photographed-- kicked the pig. Once an elephant charged the pig, made Mr. Bezuidenhout evacuate the pigskin, which it tusked and trampled.

Sandusky's Snake

Two traveling salesmen from Cincinnati hired a rowboat and pulled out to fish in Lake Erie off Sandusky, Ohio last week. Suddenly a huge, heavy coil, grey on top and white underneath, broke water beside their craft; a yellow, black-crowned head six inches across the forehead, rose up and cold glittering eyes stared at them unblinkingly.

There had been stories current in Sandusky for some time concerning a sea-serpent which had frightened many a fisherman. The traveling salesmen, Frank Bagenstose and Clifford Wilson, thought their time had come. But Salesman Wilson unshipped an oar, struck out forcibly with it, stunned the apparition. Growing bolder, he and his companion fished down in the water, brought up 18 ft. of fat snake. They wadded it into the rowboat, took it to shore, crated it, locked it in their automobile. As soon as it was crated, it revived. Crowds numbering thousands filed past the motorcar to see it.

From Cleveland's Museum of Natural History came Director Henry L. Madison to have a look. He said: "After consulting reptile texts I am convinced it is a Python molurus."/- He also said the creature was big and strong enough to crush a horse. No one could decide how a Python molurus happened to be in Lake Erie.

*Sir Harry Johnston in 1901 sent back to London a piece of the hindquarters, striped reddish purple and white, which scientists took to be part of a new kind of zebra.

/-An Indian variety.

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