Tobermory

After reading the story, I at first thought the last line: ""If he was trying German irregular verbs on the poor beast," said Clovis "He deserved all he got."" was making a Historical allusion perhaps to world war one or two, thinking perhaps the Germans mistreated elephants, thus making German "offensive" to elephants. I then realized that the story was published before either war. I then looked into German irregular verbs and found that there are a lot of them and they seem really complicated, so perhaps it is a joke about the complexity of the German language. I feel that this might be to simple or shallow for what it really means but I can't really come up with anything better.