Page:The Strand Magazine (Volume 3).djvu/27

 wants people to work for nothin', you are. I want my rights as a workin' bear"; and he opens his contribution box to its fullest extent. Biscuits and another bun follow the first, and still the collecting-box is offered, till the crowd melts away. Then the bear looks round for more commiseration. Nobody being there to commiserate him, he commiserates himself. "Got to climb down again for nothin', I s'pose. Who's goin' to pay me for that, I'd like to know? Nice sort o' world this." If we had to compare this bear to a human being, who would the human being be? Let us think. There's the threat of a strike; the demand of his rights as a working bear; the peculiar English dialect he thinks in—I know he thinks in that dialect; such a bear couldn't think in any other—and there is the contribution box. Why, can it be a peculiar section of—but no, comparisons are odious.

Arriving at the monkey-house, the animal Progognomist is apt to be nonplussed. It is scarcely fair to a beginner to set him to deal with an advanced genus like the monkeys—only one remove in the class below the human family. And, besides, what sort of individual study can he make opposite a large cage, when the exhibition of a single crumb will produce the sort of demonstration which the artist here gives us? A crowd of clutching paws and chattering teeth can scarcely give grounds for any definite scientific conclusion, except that all the monkeys want the same morsel. Careful watching, however, will tell many things. How one monkey would prefer, beyond all things, the glasses off the nose of an interested bystander; but, through difficulties with the mesh of the wires, has never been able to achieve more than a single eyeglass. How even the offer of a nut will not seduce others from mutual cuticular investigations. How the Diana monkey, pretty as it is, is clearly misnamed, since it is disrespectful to suggest the possibility of the chaste goddess turning rapid summersaults by way of earning a biscuit. Many more things than these will be learned, and instructive theories based thereupon; but for our present purposed monkeys are too large a study.

A stork is a bird of a very different mental mould from the pelican. The pelican broods, the stork meditates; the pelican is a Jeremiah, the stork is a Solomon. This, of course, in the monumental or non-eating condition. A much respected if not very numerous class of Hindoo pundit achieves immortality and avoids the transmigration of his soul into an inferior body by sitting in strict seclusion, and concentrating his whole mental faculties on nothing whatever for many years, or, perhaps, by fixing his eyes upon his outstretched little finger and his thumb against his nose for as long a period. Now, if during all this time this sacred personage were to make a mistake—allow his attention to wander, for instance, in the direction of cutlets for dinner, or the Home Rule question, or his fingers, in a moment of forgetfulness, to leave his nose