[ZIG-ZAGS AT THE ZOO]
By Arthur Morrison and J A Shepherd
XXIII.—ZIG-ZAG SIMIAN.
Whence has arisen the notion that monkeys are happy creatures? Probably from the inadequate fact that they pull one another's tails and run away. But a being may be mischievous without being happy. Many mischievous boys are never happy: possibly because the laws of Nature won't permit of half the mischief they are anxious to accomplish. Still, the monkey, at any rate in a state of freedom, is looked upon as a typically happy creature. "And watch the gay monkey on high," says Bret Harte; and Mr. Kipling addresses the monkey as "a gleesome, fleasome thou," which latter looks like an attempt to make an admissible adjective pass in an unwarranted brother. I have seen monkeys fleasome, treesome, freesome, keysome (opposite adjectives these, you will perceive on reflection), and disagreesome, but cannot call to mind one that looked in the least gleesome. Everything that runs up a fence or swings on a rope is not necessarily jolly, much as the action would appear to justify the belief. Many a human creature has stormed a fence with a lively desire to attain the dogless side, but no noticeable amount of jollity; and a man escaping from fire by a rope wastes no time in unseasonable hilarity, dangle he never so quaintly. Look at their faces; look also at the monkey's face. If a monkey grin, it is with rage; his more ordinary expression of countenance is one of melancholy reflection—of sad anxiety. His most waggish tricks are performed with an air of hopeless dejection. Now, this may be due to any one of three causes, or even to a mixture of them. It may be that, like the boy, he dolorously reflects that, after all, mischief has its limits; that you cannot, so to speak, snatch the wig of the man in the moon, upset the Milky Way, or pull the tail of the Great Bear. Or it may be that a constant life of practical jokes, and of watchfulness to avert them, is a wearying and a saddening thing after all. Or it may be that every ape, meditating on his latest iniquity, tries for ever to look as though it were the other monkey.
RATHER SHY.
With many people, to speak of the Zoo monkeys is to speak of Sally. Poor Sally! Who would not weep for Sally? For Sally is dead and hath not left her peer. A perversion of Milton is excusable in the circumstances. Why is there no memorial of Sally? "Is the spot marked with no colossal bust?" as they say on invitations to bachelor small-hour revels. There should, at least, be a memorial inscription to Sally.
Sally, when first she came here in 1883, was a modest and, indeed, rather a shy chimpanzee. A few years of elementary education, however, quite changed Sally's character, for she learnt to count up to five, and to be rather impudent. Wonderfully uniform are the results of elementary education.