The Story of Dago | Page 2

came on a big ship, and carried me away to be sold to a travelling
showman.
It makes my back ache to this day to think of the ring-master's whip. I
was as quick to learn as any of the other monkeys who were in training,
but an animal who has done nothing all his life but climb and play can't
learn the ways of a human being all in one week. I was taught to ride a
pony and drive a team of greyhounds, and to sit at a table and feed
myself with a silver folk. One half-hour I was made to be a gentleman,
and wear a dress suit, and tip my hat to the ladies, and the next I would
be expected to do something entirely different; be a policeman, maybe,
and arrest a rowdy dog in boxing-gloves. Oh, I couldn't begin to tell
you the things I was expected to do, from drilling like a soldier to
wheeling a doll carriage and smoking a pipe. Sometimes when I grew
confused, and misunderstood the signals and did things all wrong, the
ring-master would swing his whip until it cracked like a pistol, and
shout out, in a terrible voice, "Oh, you stupid little beast! What's the
matter with you?" That always frightened me so that it gave me the
shivers, and then he would shout at me again until I was still more
confused and terrified, and couldn't do anything to please him.
Stupid little beast indeed! I wished sometimes that I could have had
him captive, back in the jungles of the old home forest, just to have
seen which would have been the stupid one there. How long would it
have taken him to have learned an entirely different way of living, I

wonder. How many moons before he could swing by his hands and
hunt for his food in the tree-tops? He might have learned after awhile
where the wild paw-paws hang thickest, and where the sweetest,
plumpest bananas grow; but when would he ever have mastered all the
wood-lore of the forest folk,--or gained the quickness of eye and ear
and nose that belongs to all the wise, wild creatures? Oh, how I longed
to see him at the mercy of our old enemies, the Snake-people! One of
those pythons, for instance, "who could slip along the branches as
quietly as moss grows." That would have given him a worse fit of
shivers than the ones he used to give me.
I'll not talk about such a painful subject any longer, but you may be
sure that I was glad when something happened to the show. The owner
lost all his money, and had to sell his animals and go out of the
business. After that I had a very comfortable winter in a zoological
garden out West, near where we stranded. Then an old white-haired
man from California bought me to add to his private collection of
monkeys. He had half a dozen or so in his high-walled garden.
It was a beautiful place, hot and sunny like my old home, and full of
palm-trees and tangled vines and brilliant flowers. The most beautiful
thing in it was a great rose-tree which he called Gold of Ophir. It shook
its petals into a splashing fountain where goldfish were always
swimming around and around, and it was hard to tell which was the
brightest, the falling rose-leaves, or the tiny goldfish flashing by in the
sun.
There was a lady who used to lie in a hammock under the roses every
day and smile at my antics. She was young, I remember, and very
pretty, but her face was as white as the marble mermaid in the fountain.
The old gentleman and his wife always sat beside her when she lay in
the hammock. Sometimes he read aloud, sometimes they talked, and
sometimes a long silence would fall upon them, when the splashing of
the fountain and the droning of the bees would be the only sound
anywhere in the garden.
When they talked, it was always of the same thing: the children she had
left at home,--Stuart and Phil and little Elsie. I did not listen as closely

as I might have done had I known what a difference those children
were to make in my life. I little thought that a day was coming when
they were to carry me away from the beautiful garden that I had grown
to love almost like my old home. But I heard enough to know that they
were as mischievous as the day is long, and that they kept their poor
old great-aunt Patricia in a woful state of nervous excitement from
morning till night. I gathered, besides, that their father was a doctor,
away