34 ZOOLOGICAL SKETCHES. 



combat. But the appearance of an ally at once restored 

 his courage : as soon as I entered the room he sallied 

 forth, and seemed to defy the wrath of the tyrant by 

 marching up and down with a strutting gait and an 

 occasional wink at the neutral by-standers. When I pre- 

 tended to go out and leave him in the lurch, he would 

 sneak along the wall to regain his ambuscade by a 

 roundabout way, and remained as still as a mouse as 

 long as the angry voice of the colonel kept the room 

 under martial law. But if the irate hidalgo selected a 

 scapegoat among his boys, the monkey reappeared in 

 the background as soon as the yells of the victim told 

 him that matters were approaching a crisis, and, taking 

 advantage of the general confusion, would make a raid 

 on the table and fill his cheek-pouches with substantiate. 

 After a successful foray of this sort the house-dog often 

 joined him in his retreat, and, instead of resisting his 

 communistic claims, the Macacus then submitted to 

 black-mail, and only now and then silenced the demon- 

 strations of the quadruped by an angry gesture: " Hush 

 up, you fool !" in the plainest language of dumb show. 

 But whenever the obfuscation of the Cubano reached 

 the hypnotic stage, Buddha's tactics underwent a cor- 

 responding change : he sallied boldly, mounted the pros- 

 trate refugee with a view-halloo whoop, and sometimes 

 proceeded to search his pockets with all the cool effront- 

 ery of the Neveu de Rameau. His pragmatical specula- 

 tions on the condition of a top-heavy foe may be rather 



