St. Nicholas Volume 20, No. 1

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can usually download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1893 edition. Excerpt: ... They were fed once or twice a day, --some of them grew so tame that they would come into the veranda and eat from our knees; but they always kept one anxious eye on the open air behind them. Monkeys are sacred beasts in most parts of India, in Simla especially; but our friends knew that monkeys are sometimes caught by men and trained to ride on goats and to beat tambourines, --things no self-respecting monkey would dream of doing. Once a troop of trained monkeys came and performed in the garden, and the wild monkeys sat about on the trees and said the worst things that they could think of, and the trained monkeys in their blueand-red petticoats looked at them sorrowfully. When the performance was ended, all our friends All rights reserved. ran away, and I suppose they talked it over that night, 'for they were very cautious, not to say rude, next morning, and the babies were put at the topmost tops of the pine-trees when the mothers and fathers came down to be fed. The tamest of our monkeys (we called them ours, because they would fight any of the tribe or family that came into the garden) was a little fellow who had once been civilized. He still wore a leather collar round his neck, which is a most unusual place for a monkey-collar to be. Generally it is put around the waist. We called him" Collar-Wallah" (the collar-man), and he would eat biscuit from my sister's hand, opening her fingers one by one. The monkeys were our great delight, and we made them show off before callers, and drew pictures of them, and chased them out of our rooms, and saw as much of their ways as they chose to show. We never understood when they went to bed, but we heard them mewing like cats up in the trees; and late at night, coming home from a dinner, ...