A MONKEY IN A MINE.
I once heard an amusing story of the consternation created in a mine by the introduction of a monkey. Somebody connected with the place had in a mysterious way become proprietor of a monkey, and one day he took the beast with him into the mine. The monkey made no objection to going there; but after reaching the tunnel where the men were at work, he became alarmed, and ran about very uncomfortably. He went from one place to another, attracted by the light, and in hopes of finding a friend. Many of the men had never seen a creature of his kind before; some thought it was the devil, as they could not imagine what else it could be, and some thought it an enormously overgrown rat.
One of the men was lying on his side, digging away at the base of a vein of coal. The monkey thought he recognized in this man a friend, or somebody who ought to be a friend, and went for him. The man knew nothing about the presence of the beast until the latter scrambled upon him and looked full in his face. The miner gave a scream, and fainted. Such a face had never before been turned towards his own, and his alarm was not at all surprising. The monkey left him, and then sprang among a group of men who were loading a car of coal. They stopped work, and shouted to their comrades that the devil was in the mine. In fact, within fifteen minutes that single animal had created an alarm among the men that was not quelled for two or three hours. The beast finally ran to the shaft, made a leap into the darkness, went down four hundred feet or more, and struck upon a pile of coal. As a monkey, he was not of much consequence after that.
Digressions are permissible in a popular work of this kind, and I take the liberty of giving a story of a monkey, which was told me quite recently by an eye-witness of his pranks.
PRANKS OF A MONKEY AT SEA.
“I was sailing as an ordinary seaman at one time on an American man-of-war. There were about five hundred men on board, and sometimes there was very little for us to do. Out in the East Indies, at one of the ports where we touched, we picked up a lot of monkeys. They belonged to the officers, but somehow the monkeys preferred to associate with the men. They had the free run of the whole ship, and did pretty much as they liked. They used to steal everything they could lay their hands on, and for a month or two the sailors had very little to do except playing with them.
“When we got out to sea, nearly all of the brutes died. We sailed up north in the Pacific Ocean, and it got rather cold. One monkey had brains enough to hunt out a warm place, and went down into the engine-room, where he used to sit and look at the stokers stirring up the fires. He would sit there, and make faces at them; and one of the officers said that the monkey, if he had any idea of a future state of existence, must imagine that he was in a sort of purgatory, and that the stokers stirring up the fire were keeping it hot for roasting a lot of fellows who were expected to arrive. He managed to live until we got back into the tropics again, and then he came out of his hiding-place, and used to go round among us as sociable as ever.
A LIVELY CHASE.
“He wasn’t an aristocrat, that monkey, and didn’t seem to have any high notions about society. One hour he would be in the cabin with the captain, and the next thing you would hear of him, he would be in the galley, making friends with the nigger cook. One day he took the cook’s cap, carried it into the cabin, and put it on the captain’s head. The captain did not like that sort of familiarity, and he ousted the beast from his cabin. He was constantly kicking up a row everywhere, but he was such an amusing duck that everybody liked him.