“I bounced the ball repeatedly for two months after, but I found that it still remained in its infancy. At last I suspected that the savage (to use a vulgar phrase) had come Yorkshire over me, and so I determined to find out how he had managed to take me in. I cut the ball in two, and then saw what a taut trick he had played me. It seems he had chewed some leaves into a lump, the size of a walnut, and then dipped them into the liquid gum-elastic. It immediately received a coat about as thick as a sixpence. He then rolled some more leaves round it, and gave it another coat. He seems to have continued this process till he had made the ball considerably larger than the one I had procured; and, in order to put his roguery out of all chance of detection, he made the last and outer coat thicker than a dollar. This Indian would, no doubt, have thriven well in some of our great towns.”
THE MONKEY AMONGST MEN, OR THE HOUSE IN REGENT’S PARK.
