CHAPTER I.
THE DEALER IN ANIMALS.
Several years ago, or, to speak more accurately, in 1871, Philip Garland, a young man of not more than seventeen years, succeeded his father in the business of buying, selling and training wild animals, making a specialty of those belonging to the monkey kingdom.
Garland, senior, was well and favorably known throughout the country by proprietors of museums, circuses, and collectors generally, and his son found himself the fortunate possessor of an unblemished reputation and an extensive establishment, together with a large capital of ready money, but not a relative to whom he could turn for relaxation from the cares of business.
Philip and his father had led lonely lives, so far as intercourse with other members of the human family was concerned. As a matter of fact they were well acquainted with their regular customers; but these came only in the hours devoted to business, tarried no longer than was absolutely necessary, and probably cared not one whit how these merchants passed their leisure time.
Perhaps this comparative isolation was the cause of Philip’s devoting himself with such assiduity to his profession, if such it may be termed. From his childhood the senior Garland had instilled into his son’s mind the rudiments of natural history, and having the rare faculty of so presenting dry subjects as to make them interesting, he had so thoroughly enlisted the boy’s attention and sympathies that when Master Philip found himself at the head of the establishment he was one of the most enthusiastic students.
Unlike his father, he was a naturalist in the full sense of the word, and devoted himself more particularly to noting the peculiarities and habits of four-handed mammals, otherwise known as the monkey tribe.
In two months after the elder Garland died Philip’s collection was composed principally of apes, he having so reduced the stock by forced sales that nearly every other species of animal, as well as the entire lot of birds, had given way to the tribe in whose habits he was so deeply interested.
As a matter of course, any variety of the monkey-kind are more valuable when their talents for imitation have been developed by the aid of education, and the new head of the house of Garland & Co. made a point of instructing his live articles of merchandise in the most thorough manner.