Page:The Strand Magazine (Volume 3).djvu/308

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MONKEY SOCIETY.
309


"Forty winks."

than the brown capuchin, I'd give something to have hold of him for ten minutes. The lazy beggar sleeps the whole day long in the box at the top of his cage, and they let him. If a few of us club together, and organise a little party for forty winks, it soon gets stopped. Someone falls in among us, or we get dragged apart by the tails, and quite right, too. No decent member of the community has the right or even the wish to deprive the others of the benefit of his society for longer than absolutely necessary to rest the frame and brighten the intellect. Personally, I believe the Aye-aye is sulking because of the eclipse of his name. Chiromys Madagascariensis is a very fine name, anyone will admit, but when I came with Cercopithecus callitrichus I beat it by one letter. So he sulks. Then in the night, when we want quiet, he comes out and rackets about his cage.


"A fairly select set."

Altogether, however, especially in this cage, we are, although slow, a fairly select set. Our manners, at any rate, will compare favourably with those of any other set in the house. One rule of etiquette is never, in any circumstances, violated in this cage, except in the case of the pig-faced baboon. That is the rule that enjoins that should one stand still (an undesirable thing in itself) it must never be opposite the ticket bearing his name and birthplace. It is