346 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



own home, and after trying in vain to procure a ready-made cage 

 of sufficient size, lodged liis guests in a garden house on a hill 

 overlooking the Old Fort railway depot. 



Old Fort, near the upper or west end of McDowell County, 

 must have an elevation of at least two thousand feet above sea 

 level. The proximity of Mitchell's Peak has made the little town 

 something of a summer resort, even the dog days being pleasantly 

 cool, but the winter temperature deserves a chillier name, and the 

 railway to Asheville has more than once been blockaded by snow- 

 drift. The locality, in fact, can hardly claim the climate of a 

 perennial pleasure resort, for visitors from the African tropics, 

 but Captain T 's guests were overjoyed to exchange their nar- 

 row traveling cage for a roomy pavilion with lattice walls admit- 

 ting breezes from every quarter of the compass. 



In that playground of all the mountain winds the two four- 

 handers have romped about year after year, as happy as hawks 

 in a tower roost, and free from the slightest symptoms of lung 

 disorders. 



" Does your brother ever wash himself ? " a friend of mine 

 asked the junior relative of a Tennessee ragamuffin. " Yes, some- 

 times on Sunday," said the youngster ; and sometimes on holi- 

 days the litter at the bottom of the garden house is raked out and 

 a bundle of clean straw flung in. The bill of fare is what the 

 vegetarians call a " compromise diet " frugal on the whole, but 

 varied with eggs, hash, and occasional remnants of pork and 

 cheese. Fragments of tobacco, and flasks suggesting the surrep- 

 titious visits of contrabandists from the highlands, are now and 

 then found in the litter, but mountain air, like Count Tolstoi's 

 atonement of labor, cancels the debt of such peccadillos. The 

 native land of the Mangaby {Cercocebus fuUginosus) is the coast 

 plain of Loango, north of the Congo valley, and immediately 

 south of the equator, and, with the exception of the Gaboon delta, 

 about the most sultry-hot region of the African continent. Cap- 

 tain T 's pets were not born in captivity, but shipped directly 



from the mouth of the Congo to New York city, and from New 

 York to western North Carolina, where they arrived in Septem- 

 ber i. e., with hardly two months' time for acclimatization to a 

 country with the winter isotherms of northern Maryland. In 

 stress of storms they do now and then avail themselves of their 

 straw bed, but in calm, frosty nights they stick to their top perch 

 with the obstinacy of a pillar saint. The Mangaby is irascible to 

 a grotesque degree, and the mischievous pranks of the local 

 youngsters often throw the two exiles into a delirium of rage 

 that can not fail to aggravate the debilitating effects of confine- 

 ment and uncongenial food, but an abundant supply of pure 

 (though often ice-cold) air has turned the scales against all these 



