A good innings

In Competition No. 2452 you were invited to write an elegy on the death, in Queensland, Australia, of a 176-year-old tortoise called Harriet, who had met Darwin in the Galapagos Islands and was for most of her life wrongly thought to be male.
D.H. Lawrence, Marianne Moore and Ogden Nash have all written lyrically about tortoises, so you were in good company. As for Harriet (whose parents were Testudo and Tartarus and whose favourite snacks were aubergine, courgette, beans and barley), a biologist tells me that it’s not as simple as you might think to tell the sex of a tortoise. Just try it! I realise now that my childhood tortoise Zebedee may well have been a Zuleika. The prizewinners, printed below, get £25 each, and the bonus fiver goes to Ray Kelley, appropriately a Queenslander.

Harriet, gentle giant tortoise,
We honour you. Your century and three-quarters
Spanned Penny Post and World Wide Web.