Once upon a time, in a sunny savanna, there lived a sweet and gentle giraffe named Gina. All day long, Gina loved to laugh. Her high, lilting giggles would echo across the plains and put a smile on everyone’s face. While the animals might be feeling gloomy, Gina would prance up to them with a twinkle in her eyes, and soon they would be laughing together.
The zebra munching his grass would glance over and giggle at the funny-looking creature with the long neck. The hippo splashing in the river would raise his big head and reveal rows of shining teeth while he rolled about in laughter. But no sooner would these friends look seriously about them than they’d notice poor Gina all alone by herself again. So the zebra and hippo would soon laugh once more, which only made Gina laugh harder, for she couldn’t see what they were laughing about, since they were no funny-looking creatures at all.
One day a kind-hearted lioness came by just as Gina was walking up and down, stretching her neck to see what she could find, for she was quite too anxious to meet with some friend who’d love a good laugh with her to stop and munch.
“Why, you poor thing,” said the lioness. “No wonder you laugh alone, for they do so tease you; come with me, and I’ll show you those two mean animals as will never come by while you’re doing that high prancing jig on your long legs and laughing till the tears run down your cheeks.”
This so startled Gina that she said, “Tell me who or what it is they fear, and I will never laugh again, not if I lose all my friends.”
“You’ll lose a good many, including me, Miss Lost-Laughter, if you do anything so silly,” was the answer. “I can’t bear to hear one even mewing or groaning, so I came here to tell you where you could best be with no one to annoyed by your laughing and prancing. Come with me.”
Gina followed slowly beside her, for she so loved to laugh over a fine story, and her queenly head was poked into this one or the other to coax and make friends with the writer of them.
But just as they expected a very fine-grained entertainment, the ups and downs of a lady lioness and her family and how they lived in the pleasantest, most uninteresting ‘cuddle, every juicy bird, animal. There seemed even a tame goat and calf in their meal-times, and there was no eating one another except when they got fight up in each other’s fur, and the meat left by friends after a sick lion had quite spoiled for long with all their savage teeth and claws meant lions for dinner who were lucky enough to have woolly sheep and pretty little fat-haired calves to live with.
So they all went about doing good till one or other of them forgot, and, looking through a grating that they meant to knit carefully together with from half an hour’s to an hour and a half’s sowing, found on listening the crying of a sheep with its feet in the air between two lions’ paws, who were quietly crushing its voice out of it and felt suddenly as if partaking of eatables well seasoning by only needful waiters and pourers and slicers and carvers.
Then, of course, all the ladies and all the children came running to have their share, and genals and lions all collided with the butter-shops, such as they were, in wasteful fashion till the skeletons left outside the den for birds and beasts of prey drip about and keep green at the roots till their very junction got spongy and the perpetually kept limbs of the sheep the calves, and the kids from which bones of the skeletons could not get thoroughly cleaned, grew dissimilar with hunger, but they all did make one feast of gnawing bones without a lick of food or a look of joy or even a cry of eagerness being between meals.