Dissing hippos

Mary Kingsley, A Hippo Banquet (Penguin, 2015).

A Hippo Banquet, no. 32 in the Penguin Little Black Classics series, is a series of excerpts from Kingsley’s Travels in West Africa (1879).

[“Her ’prentice hand” is from Robert Burns, “Green Grow the Rashes”: “Auld Nature swears, the lovely dears / Her noblest work she classes, O: / Her prentice han’ she tried on man, / An’ then she made the lasses, O.”