Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 46.djvu/359

Rh swallow substances which no self-respecting chimpanzee would have touched with the tip of his tongue. Instead of noticing the improvements of his gymnasium, he would turn over on his side and stare into the darkest corner of his den for hours together, with the perversity of a fourhanded Schopenhauer, resolved to see only the shady side of things. On extra warm days he became restless, running to and fro as if under the impulse of some unsatisfied desire, or watch the playground of his privileged neighbors like an orphan boy viewing the forbidden paradise through the bars of a poorhouse window, and wondering how he came to deserve his sad predicament. At such times the invalid's face, indeed, often assumed an expression more pathetically human than anything ever observed in his fits of mimicry; he looked haggard and contemplative, but his appearance was ascribed to gastric causes—some transient indigestion, brought on by his dietetic aberration. Yes, it must be dyspepsia; it seemed impossible, with such precautions against cold, that he could have contracted a disorder of the lungs. Were not the glass plates fitted tight all around, almost like the walls of an aquarium? And were they not double?

The sick half-brother sighed when sympathetic visitors crowded around his sweatbox; he evidently guessed their benevolent intentions, but some instinct seemed to tell him that his complaint had passed the remediable stage. Once, in October, and again in January, during a spell of bracing, clear cold weather, the flickering flame burned a little brighter, but the progress of emaciation continued, till the deliquium of the knee-muscles and an almost total loss of appetite marked the beginning of the end. One afternoon Pat astonished his keeper by declining his brandy ration. He sniffed it, but turned away with disgust, looking "life-weary," as a local journalist expressed it, "and anxious to leave a world where a monkey without a tail can not hope to get a fair chance anyhow."

The next morning those expressive eyes had faded into a blind stare, and the directors of the Zoo invited a number of medical men to attend the autopsy. All sorts of diagnostic theories had been advanced, but the first slit through the pleura set those controversies at rest. "Gentlemen, I was mistaken," said the officiating surgeon; "I'm no monkey-doctor: Pat Rooney is just a mass of tubercles."

About the same time when the champion chimpanzee made his début at Cincinnati, Ohio, a southern railway official brought a pair of Mangaby apes to Old Fort, North Carolina. They had originally been intended as a present to a resident of Asheville, in the adjoining county, but the addressee having intimated his aversion to zoölogical side shows, the importer sent them to his