sojourn
in--ah--in--well, never mind where. I never could remember the names of
places. The interesting point is that at one period of my life I was a
master of the monkey language. I have even gone so far as to write a
sonnet in Simian, which was quite as intelligible to the uneducated as
nine-tenths of the sonnets written in English or American."

"Do you mean to say that you could acquire the monkey accent?" asked
Doctor Darwin, immediately interested.

"In most instances," returned the Baron, suavely, "though of course not
in all. I found the same difficulty in some cases that the German or the
Chinaman finds when he tries to speak French. A Chinaman can no more say
Trocadero, for instance, as the Frenchman says it, than he can fly. That
peculiar throaty aspirate the Frenchman gives to the first syllable, as
though it were spelled trhoque, is utterly beyond the Chinese--and beyond
the American, too, whose idea of the tonsillar aspirate leads him to
speak of the trochedeero, naturally falling back upon troches to help him
out of his laryngeal difficulties."

"You ought to have been on the staff of _Punch_, Baron," said Thackeray,
quietly. "That joke would have made you immortal."

"I _am_ immortal," said the Baron. "But to return to our discussion of
the Simian tongue: as I was saying, there were some little points about
the accent that I could never get, and, as in the case of the German and
Chinaman with the French language, the trouble was purely physical. When
you consider that in polite Simian society most of the talkers converse
while swinging by their tails from the limb of a tree, with a sort of
droning accent, which results from their swaying to and fro, you will see
at once why it was that I, deprived by nature of the necessary apparatus
with which to suspend myself in mid-air, was unable to quite catch the
quality which gives its chief charm to monkey-talk."

"I should hardly think that a man of your fertile resources would have
let so small a thing as that stand in his way," said Doctor Livingstone.
"When a man is able to make a reputation for himself like yours, in which
material facts are never allowed to interfere with his doing what he sets
out to do, he ought not to be daunted by the need of a tail. If you
could make a cherry-tree grow out of a deer's head, I fail to see why you
could not personally grow a tail, or anything else you might happen to
need for the attainment of your ends."