Stupid little beast indeed! I wished sometimes that I could have had
him captive, back in the jungles of the old home forest, just to have
seen which would have been the stupid one there. How long would it
have taken him to have learned an entirely different way of living, I
wonder. How many moons before he could swing by his hands and hunt for
his food in the tree-tops? He might have learned after awhile where
the wild paw-paws hang thickest, and where the sweetest, plumpest
bananas grow; but when would he ever have mastered all the wood-lore
of the forest folk,--or gained the quickness of eye and ear and nose
that belongs to all the wise, wild creatures? Oh, how I longed to see
him at the mercy of our old enemies, the Snake-people! One of those
pythons, for instance, "who could slip along the branches as quietly
as moss grows." That would have given him a worse fit of shivers than
the ones he used to give me.
I'll not talk about such a painful subject any longer, but you may be
sure that I was glad when something happened to the show. The owner
lost all his money, and had to sell his animals and go out of the
business. After that I had a very comfortable winter in a zoological
garden out West, near where we stranded. Then an old white-haired man
from California bought me to add to his private collection of monkeys.
He had half a dozen or so in his high-walled garden.
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