n important conversation which has furnished matter for
after-reflection to all who have taken part in it, there commonly
follows a sort of pause, which in appearance is like a general
embarrassment. They walked up and down the saloon. The Assistant turned
over the leaves of various books, and came at last on the folio of
engravings which had remained lying there since Luciana's time. As soon
as he saw that it contained nothing but apes, he shut it up again.

It may have been this, however, which gave occasion to a conversation of
which we find traces in Ottilie's diary.

FROM OTTILIE'S DIARY

"It is strange how men can have the heart to take such pains with the
pictures of those hideous monkeys. One lowers one's-self sufficiently
when one looks at them merely as animals, but it is really wicked to
give way to the inclination to look for people whom we know behind such
masks."

"It is a sure mark of a certain obliquity, to take pleasure in
caricatures and monstrous faces, and pigmies. I have to thank our kind
Assistant that I have never been vexed with natural history; I could
never make myself at home with worms and beetles."

"Just now he acknowledged to me, that it was the same with him. 'Of
nature,' he said, 'we ought to know nothing except what is actually
alive immediately around us. With the trees which blossom and put out
leaves and bear fruit in our own neighborhood, with every shrub which we
pass by, with every blade of grass on which we tread, we stand in a real
relation. They are our genuine compatriots. The birds which hop up and
down among our branches, which sing among our leaves, belong to us; they
speak to us from our childhood upward, and we learn to understand their
language. But let a man ask himself whether or not every strange
creature, torn out of its natural environment, does not at first sight
make a sort of painful impression upon him, which is only deadened by
custom. It is a mark of a motley, dissipated sort of life, to be able to
endure monkeys, and parrots, and black people, about one's self."

"Many times when a certain longing curiosity about these strange objects
has come over me, I have envied the traveler who sees such marvels in
living, everyday connection with other marvels. But he, too, must have
become another man. Palm-trees will not allow a man to wander among them
with impunity; and doubtless his tone of thinking becomes very different
in a land where elephants and tigers