THE MONKEY AND THE SUGAR.
I remember once in India giving a tame monkey a lump of sugar inside a corked bottle. The monkey was of an inquiring mind, and it nearly killed it. Sometimes in an impulse of disgust it would throw the bottle away, out of its own reach, and then be distracted until it was given back to it.
At others it would sit with a countenance of the most intense dejection, contemplating the bottled sugar, and then, as if pulling itself together for another effort at solution, would sternly take up the problem afresh, and gaze into it. It would tilt it up one way and try to drink the sugar out of the neck, and then, suddenly reversing it, try to catch it as it fell out at the bottom.
Under the impression that it could capture it by a surprise, it kept rasping its teeth against the glass in futile bites, and warming to the pursuit of the revolving lump, used to tie itself into regular knots round the bottle. Fits of the most ludicrous melancholy would alternate with spasm of delight as a new idea seemed to suggest itself, followed by a fresh series of experiments.
Nothing availed, however, until one day a light was shed upon the problem by a jar of olives falling from the table with a crash, and the fruit rolling about in all directions. His monkeyship contemplated the catastrophe, and reasoned upon it with the intelligence of a Humboldt. Lifting the bottle high in his claws, he brought it down upon the floor with a tremendous noise, smashing the glass into fragments, after which he calmly transferred the sugar to his mouth and munched it with much satisfaction.
FUN AT RECESS.—"THE TUG OF WAR."