Page:The Strand Magazine (Volume 3).djvu/306

 One day an artless-looking boy came to the wires, munching. He offered a little biscuit to a small Mona. I do not approve of spoiling the digestions of young monkeys with biscuits, so I hastened to get this tit-bit. Of course the greedy beast with the full pouches got there first, and popped it into his mouth before I could touch it. There was mustard in that biscuit. That's what I call an interposition of Providence. Greediness is bad enough, but this chap aggravates it by hypocrisy. Pleads the large family he has to support—as though he ever gave them any! If I could see that artless-looking boy again I would suggest another biscuit with dynamite in it. That would empty his pouches!

Speaking of owing grudges, bites, and ones for themselves, reminds me that we in this cage owe a lot of these things in different parts of the house which we can't pay. The vanity of some of those in the cages about the walls is sickeningly irritating. The lemurs, for instance, are continually showing off their long bushy tails, pretending coyly to hide their faces behind them—brazen baggages! And they loop them round their necks, too, like a boa, because they have seen the women humans do it, who come here to gape and giggle at nothing. One might almost suppose, to see their airs, that these lemurs prefer their great useless feather-brushes to a decent and useful smooth, long tail, which you can hang on to things with. Then the Diana monkey at the end is positively improper. To begin with, the creature's insupportable pride in the name of some goddess—whom even the humans won't own nowadays—is distinctly objectionable, especially as the name is quite inappropriate. Diana never had a white beard and whiskers; I don't believe she had a tail. And if she behaved in the servile, cadging manner of that monkey, trying to attract the attention of those human animals, and turning heels over head for nuts—well, she was no lady. The irritating thing is that the beast always gets the nuts. I can't stand seeing this. I always have to go and whack the little brown capuchin.

There are others we all owe something to, but on the whole the score is fairly balanced. I am alluding to two or three big rascals wired off in separate cages near ours because of their ill manners and roughness. They reach through now and again and claw at us, but we collect a little party and extract almost as much fun from the business as in the case of the pig-faced baboon. And then the visitor-creatures rarely give them anything, being afraid of them; and the mesh of their wires is so close that they can't get anything desirable, such as a bonnet ornament or a pair of spectacles, through them. So that they have their punishment.

But the Barbary ape isn't so easily forgiven. He is one of these segregated savages, in every respect as bad as the others, besides possessing one insufferable iniquity fortunately rare among us, but, I fear, spreading. I mean a low, mean, unworthy snobbishness and abasement which treats the humans as superior creatures, and affects a ludicrous familiarity and connection with them. This fellow, glad enough to steal our nuts when no visitors are about, in their presence mounts his perch with his back to us, and turns up his nose. He gives himself away, however, if they offer him anything, by his ill-mannered grab—taking a biscuit as though it were a flower or an eyeglass. He gets into the habit through