Page:McClure's Magazine volume 10.djvu/472

80 Occasionally, too, he whimpered like a boy. Oh, he did look so sick—and I know from experience, that he wished he was dead! Three or four days later, however, I saw him with clear eyes, swinging head, and an appetite that threatened to clear the ship out of baled hay.

"My monks down there could stand a little more light," said an animal man, in charge of the monkeys. "A monk is all right as long as he can see what's going on. Shut him up long and, like a bird under similar conditions, he will soon die. People who crowd around the monks at the show amuse the little chaps." This is the other way of putting it.

One day, one of the "little chaps" got out, and amused himself at the expense of the keepers. He leaped upon the tigers' cage, and disappeared in the gloom of the hold, chattering joyfully the while. Everybody in sight started for him, or called to him, for it was "Philip," the pet. But Philip merely grinned, and chattered in his own language, and dodged from cage to cage. He seemed to delight in letting some one get close to him and then jumping away, to laugh at his would-be captor's discomfiture. It was not till dinner-time that Philip consented to come back to camp. When it became a question between liberty and dinner, it was easily and satisfactorily settled.

The decks of the "Massachusetts" resemble more the back door of a circus than they do the visible area of an ocean-going steamer outward bound. Red wagons, white wagons, chariots of gold, wardrobe vans, fairy floats, canvas-covered cages, and other circus equipage fill all available space. And among these effects, and below, forward and aft, somewhere—heaven only knows just where—are stowed 186 people, exclusive of the ship's crew. They are canvas men, rail-road men, animal men, mechanics, property men, hostlers, grooms, and jockeys. Down in the bowels of the big ship are hundreds of horses, camels, elephants, zebras, lions, tigers, and curious cattle and savage beasts of every variety and clime. They are confined in rows of stalls, or in groups of cages—the ordinary circus cage removed from its running-gear, and placed flat on the deck, and securely braced from the beams above. The only animals on the exposed deck are the polar bears, the sea-lions, and the trained