A MONKEY HUNT IN THE MOUNTAINS. 297 
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 tree, 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 
