156 IVORY AND THE ELEPHANT
business
and established the Farmers' and Drovers' Bank in one half of the
"Elephant Hotel." This was regarded as one of the strongest banking
institutions in the State; it went into liquidation in 1905. Many
distinguished men found their way from time to time to Bailey's hotel,
and it was here that Commodore Vanderbilt became acquainted with Daniel
Drew; Washington Irving and Nathaniel Hawthorne were also visitors.
How
old the elephant was when Mr. Bailey bought it of his seafaring brother
we do not know, but it survived until 1845, and the skin was then
mounted by the great showman, Phineas T. Barnum, and shown for several
years in his "Museum" in New York City, where it was destroyed with the
other objects of the heterogeneous collection gathered there when the
building housing them was burned down in 1866. The man to whose
enterprise our country owed its first example of one of these great
pachyderms passed away at the ripe age of seventy, September 2, 1845,
the very year in which his elephant died, and his life seems to have
illustrated the words chiselled on his tombstone: "Enterprise,
Perseverance, Integrity."
A
notable case of self-immolation on the part of a military leader to
secure a victory is told of Eleazar, brother of Judas Maccabee. At the
battle of Bethzacharias, in 163 B. C, between the Jewish forces and
those of Antiochus V. Eupa-ter, the valiant Eleazar noted that one of
the war elephants of the Syrians was conspicuous for its size and
especially richly caparisoned. He therefore concluded that this animal
bore the king. Animated by the desire to strike terror into the hearts
of the Syrians and also to earn immortal fame for himself, he forced
his way through the ranks of the enemy until he had reached this
elephant. Crouching down, he then got under the animal's body and
wounded it mortally with his sword, but was crushed to death
