Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 46.djvu/360

346 own home, and after trying in vain to procure a ready-made cage of sufficient size, lodged his guests in a garden house on a hill overlooking the Old Fort railway depot.

Old Fort, near the upper or west end of McDowell County, must have an elevation of at least two thousand feet above sea level. The proximity of Mitchell's Peak has made the little town something of a summer resort, even the dog days being pleasantly cool, but the winter temperature deserves a chillier name, and the railway to Asheville has more than once been blockaded by snowdrift. The locality, in fact, can hardly claim the climate of a perennial pleasure resort, for visitors from the African tropics, but Captain T's guests were overjoyed to exchange their narrow traveling cage for a roomy pavilion with lattice walls admitting breezes from every quarter of the compass.

In that playground of all the mountain winds the two fourhanders have romped about year after year, as happy as hawks in a tower roost, and free from the slightest symptoms of lung disorders.

"Does your brother ever wash himself?" a friend of mine asked the junior relative of a Tennessee ragamuffin. "Yes, sometimes on Sunday," said the youngster; and sometimes on holidays the litter at the bottom of the garden house is raked out and a bundle of clean straw flung in. The bill of fare is what the vegetarians call a "compromise diet"—frugal on the whole, but varied with eggs, hash, and occasional remnants of pork and cheese. Fragments of tobacco, and flasks suggesting the surreptitious visits of contrabandists from the highlands, are now and then found in the litter, but mountain air, like Count Tolstoi's atonement of labor, cancels the debt of such peccadillos. The native land of the Mangaby (Cercocebus fuliginosus) is the coast plain of Loango, north of the Congo valley, and immediately south of the equator, and, with the exception of the Gaboon delta, about the most sultry-hot region of the African continent. Captain T's pets were not born in captivity, but shipped directly from the mouth of the Congo to New York city, and from New York to western North Carolina, where they arrived in September—i. e., with hardly two months' time for acclimatization to a country with the winter isotherms of northern Maryland. In stress of storms they do now and then avail themselves of their straw bed, but in calm, frosty nights they stick to their top perch with the obstinacy of a pillar saint. The Mangaby is irascible to a grotesque degree, and the mischievous pranks of the local youngsters often throw the two exiles into a delirium of rage that can not fail to aggravate the debilitating effects of confinement and uncongenial food, but an abundant supply of pure (though often ice-cold) air has turned the scales against all these