Patrick O’Brian

Caesar & Hussein: Two Classic Novels from the Author of MASTER AND COMMANDER


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      CAESAR

       The Life Story of a Panda-Leopard

panda-leopard

      &

      HUSSEIN

       An Entertainment

elephant

      Patrick O’Brian

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       Copyright

      HarperCollinsPublishers

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      London SE1 9GF

       www.harpercollins.co.uk

      This eBook edition published 2019

      Caesar first published by G.P. Putnam’s Sons 1930

      Second edition published by the British Library 1999

      First published by HarperCollinsPublishers 2000

      Hussein first published by Oxford University Press 1938

      Second edition published by the British Library 1999

      First published by HarperCollinsPublishers 2000

      Copyright © The Estate of the late Patrick O’Brian CBE 1930, 1938, 1999

      Patrick O’Brian asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

      Cover design by Andrew Davis © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2019

      Cover Images © Shutterstock.com

      A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

      All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.

      Source ISBN: 9780008337377

      Ebook Edition © December 2019 ISBN: 9780008337384

      Version: 2019-10-22

       Contents

       Cover

       Title Page

      Copyright

      Foreword

      CAESAR: THE LIFE STORY OF A PANDA-LEOPARD

      Chapter One

      Chapter Two

       HUSSEIN: AN ENTERTAINMENT

       Chapter One

       Chapter Two

       Chapter Three

       Chapter Four

       Chapter Five

       Chapter Six

       Chapter Seven

       Chapter Eight

       Chapter Nine

       Chapter Ten

       Chapter Eleven

       Chapter Twelve

       Chapter Thirteen

       Chapter Fourteen

       Chapter Fifteen

       Chapter Sixteen

       Chapter Seventeen

       Chapter Eighteen

       Chapter Nineteen

       Chapter Twenty

       Chapter Twenty-One

       About the Author

       The Works of Patrick O’Brian

       About the Publisher

       Foreword

      It is a curious experience looking back from a distance of more than seventy years at the little creature who shared one’s name, bones, and indeed a good deal of one’s essential being, as far as it can be made out at all objectively. Curious and by no means entirely agreeable: I doubt if my present self would have liked the twelve-year-old boy who wrote this tale — he was certainly not very popular among his brothers and sisters. Nevertheless, that remote being and myself, his aged descendant, are linked by a common delight in reading: the boy read voraciously, often in bed, by the light of an electric torch. And when he was very young his stepmother, the kindest of women, took him to see her sister, who gave him the Reverend Mr Wood’s Natural History, a mid-nineteenth-century edition illustrated with a fair number of engravings. Since he was already something of a naturalist (an admired, much older brother had practically invented birds), the boy devoured the book, which was written by a sensible, well-informed, scholarly man. The boy was also something of an invalid, which interfered with his education and worried his father, a bacteriologist in the early days of vaccines and electrical treatment: the young fellow (pre-adolescent: a sort of elderly child) therefore spent long sessions in the incubator room, sitting at a glass-topped metal table and doing the simple tasks set by his tutor. But the tasks left a good deal of time unoccupied, and since it was obviously unthinkable to bring a book to read, the boy, by some mental process that I can no longer recall, decided to write one for himself, thus discovering an extraordinary joy which