forests. Perhaps it would be better to skip the circus part, too, for
it was a very unhappy time that followed, after I was stolen from home
by some men who came on a big ship, and carried me away to be sold to
a travelling showman.

It makes my back ache to this day to think of the ring-master's whip.
I was as quick to learn as any of the other monkeys who were in
training, but an animal who has done nothing all his life but climb
and play can't learn the ways of a human being all in one week. I was
taught to ride a pony and drive a team of greyhounds, and to sit at a
table and feed myself with a silver folk. One half-hour I was made to
be a gentleman, and wear a dress suit, and tip my hat to the ladies,
and the next I would be expected to do something entirely different;
be a policeman, maybe, and arrest a rowdy dog in boxing-gloves. Oh, I
couldn't begin to tell you the things I was expected to do, from
drilling like a soldier to wheeling a doll carriage and smoking a
pipe. Sometimes when I grew confused, and misunderstood the signals
and did things all wrong, the ring-master would swing his whip until
it cracked like a pistol, and shout out, in a terrible voice, "Oh, you
stupid little beast! What's the matter with you?" That always
frightened me so that it gave me the shivers, and then he would shout
at me again until I was still more confused and terrified, and
couldn't do anything to please him.

Stupid little beast indeed! I wished sometimes that I could have had
him captive, back in the jungles of the old home forest, just to have
seen which would have been the stupid one there. How long would it
have taken him to have learned an entirely different way of living, I
wonder. How many moons before he could swing by his hands and hunt for
his food in the tree-tops? He might have learned after awhile where
the wild paw-paws hang thickest, and where the sweetest, plumpest
bananas grow; but when would he ever have mastered all the wood-lore
of the forest folk,--or gained the quickness of eye and ear and nose
that belongs to all the wise, wild creatures? Oh, how I longed to see
him at the mercy of our old enemies, the Snake-people! One of those
pythons, for instance, "who could slip along the branches as quietly
as moss grows." That would have given him a worse fit of shivers than
the ones he used to give me.

I'll not talk about such a painful subject any longer, but you may be
sure that I was glad when something ha