"Don't stare at him or he may spring at you," cautioned Mrs. Burbanks. "Monkeys are just the opposite to most animals. You cannot treat one or control him in the same way, for it angers him to have you look him in the eye. The servants all tell me that."
As they turned away, the bearer entered the room. To his wife's amusement, Mr. Burbanks addressed him fretfully. "Boy, can't you drive these monkeys away? They are beginning to be a nuisance."
"Me touch a monkey!" The usually obedient boy raised his hands in horror.
During the dialogue the monkey had scuttled away. So the high window was closed by the long bamboo pole, for—"The monkeys must be kept out even if the ventilation is interfered with," said the head of the house.
After breakfast the post brought a package of home letters and, although it was the middle of the morning, Mr. Burbanks took a while off, after his week of strenuous work, to listen to home news. He laid himself in a comfortable chair preparatory to listening to his wife's reading, for he always preferred to hear her comments and exclamations as she read aloud than to read the letters himself. Mrs. Burbanks seated herself at the table beside him and, although a young woman, put out her hand to take up the reading glasses which invariably lay by her sewing basket.
"Why, my glasses aren't here!" she exclaimed in a tone of annoyance.
A search followed but no glasses could be found. After a while, in despair, Mrs. Burbanks handed the letters to her husband and prepared to be herself the listener, a situation which neither really enjoyed. But scarcely had Mr. Burbanks reached the second page of the first letter when an exclamation of surprise from his wife stopped the reading and he found her looking with laughing eyes at a spot high up on the wall. There, hanging by the bows from the moulding, were the spectacles. With one voice the two exclaimed: "A monkey!"
The boy was called and the spectacles were soon rescued from the dangerous place where they had evidently been hung with great care, for they were uninjured.
Although this was but a trifling incident, Mr. Burbanks was disturbed by the impertinence of the "ugly beasts." But his wife made no comments on the encounters of the morning, going on with her work in silence, although she had to hang her head to hide her smiling lips at some of his muttered remarks when he returned from an attempt to clear up the papers on his office desk. One valuable document was badly blotted with ink and a letter of the greatest importance he had been able to read only after patching together the torn bits gathered from the rug.
Mr. Burbanks was plainly annoyed but his annoyance grew to fear in the early afternoon when, in passing by the dining-room door, he happened to look in. Marjory had slipped into her mother's chair and with a big napkin around her neck was about to eat a luscious guava which lay on the plate before her. Mr. Burbanks was just on the point of calling out something in play to his little daughter, when a quick motion on the wall behind her attracted his attention. Afraid to move or speak for fear of bringing greater danger to the child, the father watched in silence. An immense monkey slid down the wall and jumped into the chair beside the little girl, with his eye on the fruit before her. The child, frightened, shooed with her handkerchief at the beast, who, turning his eyes upon her, showed his teeth and snarled. The man held his breath; but the child, shoving the plate of fruit towards the animal quickly slipped from her chair and ran, unharmed, out of the room. In a second the monkey had seized the guava and was gone through the high window.