BABOONS OLD AND YOUNG. 125 



airs, and a simplicity of manners truly delightful, that 

 might with advantage be introduced into more civilised 

 communities. They stared at the wagons, we at them ; 

 but, like well-bred people, they evinced no overt curiosity 

 or surprise. It is a mark of good breeding, I believe, 

 to stare ; at least I heard a young lady once say, " He 

 must have been a gentleman he stared so ! " 



But our dogs, ill-conditioned brutes, purchased in- 

 discriminately from Kaffir or Zulu, Totty or Bushman, 

 who have never previously been in good society, wind 

 these aristocratic children of the highlands, and rush 

 forward with the intent of making an attack upon them, 

 but by dint of shouting, whip-cracking, &c., they are 

 called off. In such engagements the attacking party 

 seldom come off scathless, for, like all mountaineers, 

 apes are wonderfully clannish, and stick to each other 

 through right and wrong, thick and thin. 



Baboons apparently live a happy life, if I can judge 

 from appearances ; whether there be those bugbears of 

 human society among them, jealousy, intrigue, and fraud, 

 it would be difficult to discover. However, one thing I 

 can say is that their children are precocious and apt to 

 deem themselves of age before their time. Never- 

 theless, this is a failing common to the period in 

 which we live. The parent monkeys keep up the 

 good old custom of whacking their progeny correction 

 that is administered with a stern sense of justice. 

 Their government is patriarchal, and they are not 

 polygamists. 



Leaving the amiable family in the rear, we wind 

 along the eastern base of a magnificently grand moun- 

 tain, rising nearly three thousand feet above the plain. 

 It ought to be called the Sentinel, for it looks as if it 



