ppened to the show. The owner
lost all his money, and had to sell his animals and go out of the
business. After that I had a very comfortable winter in a zoological
garden out West, near where we stranded. Then an old white-haired man
from California bought me to add to his private collection of monkeys.
He had half a dozen or so in his high-walled garden.

It was a beautiful place, hot and sunny like my old home, and full of
palm-trees and tangled vines and brilliant flowers. The most beautiful
thing in it was a great rose-tree which he called Gold of Ophir. It
shook its petals into a splashing fountain where goldfish were always
swimming around and around, and it was hard to tell which was the
brightest, the falling rose-leaves, or the tiny goldfish flashing by
in the sun.

There was a lady who used to lie in a hammock under the roses every
day and smile at my antics. She was young, I remember, and very
pretty, but her face was as white as the marble mermaid in the
fountain. The old gentleman and his wife always sat beside her when
she lay in the hammock. Sometimes he read aloud, sometimes they
talked, and sometimes a long silence would fall upon them, when the
splashing of the fountain and the droning of the bees would be the
only sound anywhere in the garden.

When they talked, it was always of the same thing: the children she
had left at home,--Stuart and Phil and little Elsie. I did not listen
as closely as I might have done had I known what a difference those
children were to make in my life. I little thought that a day was
coming when they were to carry me away from the beautiful garden that
I had grown to love almost like my old home. But I heard enough to
know that they were as mischievous as the day is long, and that they
kept their poor old great-aunt Patricia in a woful state of nervous
excitement from morning till night. I gathered, besides, that their
father was a doctor, away from home much of the time. That was why
their great-aunt had them in charge.

Their mother had come out to her father's home in California to grow
strong and well. The sun burned a pink into the blossoms of the
oleander hedges, and the wind blew life into the swaying branches of
the pepper-trees, but neither seemed to make her any better. After
awhile she could not even be carried out to her place in the hammock.
Then they sent for Doctor Tremont and the children.

The first that I knew of their arrival, the two boys came who