A MONKEY HUNT IN THE MOUNTAINS. 277 



scaling the mammee trees and twisting off the fruit. 

 In a little while one of them reached the tree beneath 

 which we sat; a young male, about half grown, re- 

 joicing in his strength. The black monkey by my 

 side could not rest, and urged me, in excited whispers, 

 to shoot ! He at least had no misgivings on the score 

 of relationship, even though the resemblance between 

 the two the monkey in the tree, and the African, 

 the monkey on the ground was strong enough to 

 excite a smile. 



I think the monkey in the tree must have noticed 

 this resemblance, for he saw us just then and stopped. 

 The more he contemplated my companion, the stronger 

 seemed to become his convictions that he had found a 

 long-lost brother. He let himself down by his tail, 

 and beckoned for the negro to come up ; and then 

 commenced a series of evolutions that would have 

 shamed an acrobat; all, evidently, with a desire of 

 impressing his brother on the ground with the ad- 

 vantages of an arboreal over a terrestrial mode of life. 

 And the little sinner near me was all this time urging 

 me to shoot that innocent animal in the t r ee, whose 

 only fault consisted in being a monkey. But I could 

 not. I would as soon have thought of shooting the 

 clown who performed for my amusement in the circus, 

 as of killing that little harlequin in the tree. I now 

 regarded the whole thing as the "biggest show on 

 earth," as Barnum has it, and would not sully the 

 pure enjoyment of it by what, I could not help think- 

 ing, would be murder in the first degree. 



The little man in the tree swung himself into space 

 and disappeared ; in a few minutes he came skipping 

 gleefully along, followed by a monkey of maturer 



