THE HAMADRYAD. 
141 
look particularly tempting to the thirsty. The Baboons, ever on the watch for something new and to 
steal, see the pitchers and pans, and of course just taste their contents. Feeling happy and enlivened, 
after a while they try again, and finally drink long and deeply, becoming in a short time decidedly 
tipsy, and unable to take care of themselves. Drunk and incapable would be the accusation against 
them by native police. Unfortunately for the tipplers their punishment is greater than the crime ; 
and not only do they suffer all the miseries of headache, thirst, and bodily depression, but they lose 
their liberty also, and not for a time only. The natives, knowing that after a few hours they may 
expect to find the Baboons incapable of biting, fighting, or running away, go out and search for their 
victims, and bring them home and place them in durance vile. The next morning they awake to a 
sense of their condition. They hold their aching heads with both hands, and look with a most pitiable 
YOUNG H AM ADR Y AS (Front the Zoological Gardens.) 
expression. Brehm saw some of them in this plight, and gives a most amusing description of their 
grimaces and laughable conduct. A little wine or beer was offered to some who had recovered from 
their debauch, but they would have nothing to do with it at the time. They turned away with 
disgust, but they relished the juice of some lemons which was given to them. 
The Baboons, symbolical of learning, the observers of the moon in eclipse, and the companions 
of the bacchanalian jug, once so esteemed, worshipped, and mummified by the ancient Egyptians, 
have terribly fallen in social and religious reputation on the very spot of their former glories. In 
modern Egypt they may be seen in some houses where, at a fanciful kind of banquet, they have to sit 
around the room holding torches. And right bad torch-bearers they are, for every now and then some 
Baboon becomes aggressive, or some guest has a nice piece on his plate for which the Baboon longs, 
and the consequences are a departure of the light from its perpendicular, a slight motion amongst 
the row of curious candelabra, and oftentimes such disorder as can only be remedied by the timely 
application of the discipline of the stick. They are carried about to do tricks, and brutalised in 
every way. 
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