im
yacht.

"Hullo, Bob! Is that you?" replied the person in the boat, who was a boy
of about the age of Little Bobtail, though not half so handsome.

Robert had called him "Monkey," and it was not difficult to determine
where he had obtained his sobriquet, for, looking at the youth,
Darwinism seemed to be made easy, without distorting either facts or
logic. In his case, no long ages appeared to have elapsed between the
monkey and the man, and the transition seemed to have been easy and
natural. In a word, he looked like a monkey in the face, while no one
could possibly have suspected that he was one. Above his mouth his face
abruptly receded, so that the end of his nose was not far from plumb
with his lips. In the middle of his forehead the hair seemed to grow
down to the bridge of his nose. A stranger, who was not of a melancholy
turn of mind, could hardly have refrained from laughing when looking at
him for the first time. But Bobtail did not laugh, for Monkey was a
friend, and a brother, in the generic sense.

"Come on board, Monkey," added Little Bobtail.

"What boat's this?" asked the representative of Darwinism, as he leaped
upon the deck with the painter of the dory in his hand.

"The Skylark," replied Bobtail.

As the new arrival stepped upon the deck of the yacht, he was not unlike
the traditional monkey of the circus, for his dress was almost as
fantastic as his face. His father, who was a fisherman, had been lost at
sea, and his mother was a poor woman, with neither energy nor gumption,
who occupied a miserable shanty about a mile from the village, in which
hardly a mean dwelling could be found. The woman was believed to be a
little "daft," for she always hid herself when any of the town's people
appeared near her shanty. She had a garden, in which she raised potatoes
and corn, and kept a pig and a cow; and these furnished her subsistence,
with the trifle which her son earned by odd jobs. The woman's name was
Nancy Monk, and her boy's was Peter Monk, though certainly the surname
was not needed to suggest the nickname by which he was universally
called.

Of course Peter Monk's unfortunate affinity to the ape subjected him to
no little annoyance from the sneers and insults of other boys, whose
sense of decency was below their sense of the ludicrous.

Though Peter was, in the main, a good-natured fellow, there was a point
of endurance beyond which he was not proof against the coarse jeers of
his compan