152 



ZOOLOGICAL SKETCHES. 



Mahadeo! for Saki-Yam Deva's sake!" etc., etc., till the 

 fugitive saint is around the corner. 



" It isn't that rag I care for," said Dr. V.'s Prussian 

 servant, whose neckerchief had been captured by a 

 veteran honuman, " but the impudence of those fellows ; 

 I would give three months' wages if you would let me 

 catch that old wretch and give him a Pomeranian twenty- 

 fiver r 



A similar desire has got more than one Englishman 

 into serious trouble. The naturalist Duvancel had to 

 hide like a criminal when the rumor got abroad that he 

 had killed and stuffed a young honuman, and, though 

 he assured the natives that the deceased had met with 

 an accident, the Brahmins appointed a committee to 

 watch his garden day and night. Stuffing a honuman 

 is almost as bad as killing him : the corpse must be em- 

 balmed and buried with due rites. The Frankish doctors 

 are suspected of circumventing these regulations, and for 

 that and similar reasons the city monkey-hospital of 

 Benares used to be closed against all Europeans, with 

 the exception of Lady Dalhousie, a recognized bene- 

 factress of the institution. Living monkeys are, of 

 course, hard to watch, and harder to keep out of trouble, 

 — wholesale trouble, sometimes, when the long-nursed 

 wrath of an unbeliever explodes against them in some 

 out-of-the-way place. But woe to the perpetrator of 

 such a deed ! an immortality of odium will be the fate 

 of him who manages to evade temporal retribution. 



