Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 22.djvu/611

Rh In Hindostan monkeys enjoy all the privileges of a Mohammedan lunatic, being permitted to rob the orchards with impunity, decimate the rice-crop, and rob all the birds'-nests they want; but, not content with levying out-door contributions, they pillage the cottages of the natives while the proprietors are at work in the fields; nay, they often manage to despoil the larder of the foreign residents, or black-mail their children if they leave the bungalow with a lunch-basket or a pocketful of nuts.

The Rev. George Thielmann, of the Moravian mission, who passed several years in the Eastern Punjaub, describes the despair of his German cook at the impudence of the light-fingered gentry. "I do not see how the natives can stand it," said she; "f they take those baboons for Christians, they ought to have a penitentiary in every village." If she went to the door to answer a bell, the macaques entered the kitchen through the rear window; going to look after her sun-dried peaches, she found that the Bhunder apes had been beforehand with her; and if she left her bedroom-window open she was awakened



by a committee of Honumans taking an inventory of her wardrobe. One day she left the gardener's dinner under a tree where he used to take his siesta, but, returning with a dessert of German doughnuts, she was just in time to see a troop of Rhesus baboons running off with the dishes and bottles.

From the moment that a young monkey is weaned he has to steal,