THE MOUSE AND THE ELEPHANT

What if a mouse lived with an elephant?"" By way of answering this fanciful question, Hewett's full-page photographs show the mouse against what could be a caked-mud plain (but is really the elephant's ear) or a grassier landscape (""it's skin""); then he switches to a longer shot of the elephant, with the mouse a tiny spot on its head. Least satisfactory are the cluttered, fuzzy medium views With neither mouse nor elephant in focus--but there isn't a neat composition or striking juxtaposition in the lot. And Joan Hewett's 100-word text serves only to identify the elephant parts that make up the background or to ask still more silly questions. (""Would it be dangerous? . . . Could they become friends?"") True, size discrepancies are of particular interest to children--but the idea is to make something of them.