Baloo the bear, Leo the Lion and Shere Khan the tiger have the most unusual and unlikely friendship between them. They were saved eight years ago, when they were cubs only two months old.

    They were first sent to a rescue（救护）center, where they were raised together. Now they are in an American zoo. Because they came here as a kind of family, the zoo built a large clubhouse so that they could all sleep in it.

    Now they have grown up. You can see them playing around like brothers. The three big animals seem to no sense(意识) of their animal differences.

    Baloo and Shere Khan are very close. That is because they rise early, as Leo being a lion likes to spend most the day sleeping. When Leo wakes up the three of them mess around for most of the day before they settle down to some food. It is wonderful to see a giant American Black Bear put his arm around a Bengal tiger and then to see the tiger touch the bear with his nose lightly like a pet cat. You can often see they lie on top of each other for heat and for love.

    “They are not wild animals any more. But you must remember who you are dealing with when you are with them,” said one of the zoo keepers.

    JOINING A CHOIR

    I've always loved singing, but singing hasn't always loved me. I

would open my mouth with a beautiful song in my head, fully expecting my voice to follow suit — only to get an awful tone (音调）in return.

    Still, without a second thought, I continued to try to sing whenever possible. On car journeys, when my now twenty something sons weresmall, they would make a great play ( hands over their ears， shoutingNo，Mum，stop!') of going through punishment as I sang along to the radio.

    Never in a hundred years would I have thought about joining a choir. And when I did finally become a member of my first choir 15 years ago, something fantastic happened to my life. From the first time I experienced my voice as something special but also comfortable, in harmony (和谐）with the other singers, I lost my heart to singing. It was like falling in love. And everyone in the choir had the same shining smiles and bright eyes — singing made them feel happy, too.

    Although it is singing itself that makes me happy，it is also how a choir works together. There is something magical about breathing together. The voice of everyone singing quietly together is powerful and excitingly mysterious (神秘的），almost spiritual.

    And there's the unexpected friendship from the activities we do as a choir: raising money for good causes and taking our singing sometimes to places where people are forgotten and sad.

    I am now a member of six choirs and，if I can，sing every day of the week. I stand in front of several hundred people，and know that some，if not all，of each song will sound not bad at all.

    Winnie the Pooh is about 100 years old. It is my favourite, and I'm sure it's also yours. Do you know how it came to our life?

    Winnipeg is a place in Canada. Many years ago, Harry, a soldier, went to Europe from here. When he stopped at train station, he saw a man selling a little black bear. Harry bought it and named it Winnipeg. The name became Winnie in short later.

    Harry went to a lot of places. When he got to London, he left Winnie in the London Zoo. He thought they could look after Winnie.

    Near the zoo, there was a boy named Robin. He loved to visit the London Zoo with his dad. Winnie was his favourite animal. Robin's father was a writer. He wrote the bear in one of his poems for the first time. Later he wrote stories about Winnie and Robin. Slowly, the father wrote more characters(角色) like Piglet, Rabbit, Roo and Tigger and so on in his stories.

    Many people think heroes need to be handsome, rich, or very smart. But as for me, a hero is a person who always helps others. My hero is Uncle Bill. He is the oldest son of a worker, and he grew up in a poor family with four younger brothers and two little sisters.

    He was good at neither writing nor maths. In fact, he never did well in school. So he had to give up school at a very young age. He worked and gave all his money to help his parents. When he was getting older, he found that he was very interested in fixing things. He collected broken things which people threw away and fixed them. He could fix almost everything that did not work. He worked hard and never gave up. Finally, he opened his own repair shop. It took him about 20 years to become a successful shopkeeper.

    Now, he is very rich and has four shops. But he never forgets the days when he had nothing. He gives money to poor families, helps poor kids buy books and offers them free lunch. He also encourages people to reuse things. He always says, "Make good use of what you have because we just have one earth."

    I am proud of Uncle Bill. He is really a hero.

    I live in Mentone, a quiet, simple, restful place, where the rich never come. I met Theophile Magnan, a retired, rich, old man from Lyons yesterday. In the Hotel des Anglais. Theophile looked sad and dreamy, and didn't talk with anybody else. Which brought me back to the past.

A long time ago, Francois Millet. Claude, Carl and I were young artists — very young artists — in fact.

    Yes, Francois Millet. The great French artist, was my friend.

Millet wasn't any greater than we were at that time. He didn't have any fame, even in his own village.

    We were all poor though we had stacks and stacks of as good pictures as anybody in Europe painted. Once a person ever offered four francs for Millet's "Angelus", which he intended to sell for eight.

    It was a fact in human history that a great artist would never be acknowledged* until after he was starved and dead. His pictures climbed to high prices after his death.

    Then we made a decision that one of us must die, to save the others and himself.

    Millet was elected to die.

    During the next three months Millet painted with all his might, enlarged his stock all he could, not pictures, not sketches, studies, parts of studies, fragments of studies, of course, with his cipher *  on them.

    They were the things to be sold.

    Carl went to Paris to start the work of building up Millet's name. Claude and I went to sell Millet's small pictures and to build up his name as well.

    We made Millet a master. I always said to my customer, "I am a fool to sell a picture of Francois Millet's at all, for he is not going to live three months, and when he dies his pictures can't be had for love or money."

    Claude and I took care to spread that little fact as far as we could.

Carl made friends with the correspondents, and got Millet's condition reported to England and all over the continent, and America, and everywhere.

    The sad end came at last, Millet died, not really.  He became Theophile Magnan.

    The pictures went up. There's a man in Paris today who owns seventy Millet pictures. He paid us two million francs for them. Do you still remember the "Angelus"? Carl sold it for twenty—two hundred francs. And as for the bushels of sketches and studies which Millet produced in the last six weeks, well, it would astonish you to know the figure we sell them at nowadays.

    We are no longer artists and Millet dead.