Democratic Sentinel, Volume 14, Number 38, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 17 October 1890 — Bottled Sugar. [ARTICLE]

Bottled Sugar.

The author of “Under the Punkah” tells an amusing incident or his life in India. He had given to a tame monkey a lump of sugar inside a corked bottle. The monkey was of an inquiring mind, and the effort to get at the mystery—and the sugar—nearly killed him. Sometimes, in an impulse of disgust, he would throw the bottle clear out of his reach, and then be distracted until it was given back to him. At other times he would sit with a countenance of the most intense dejection, contemplating the bottled sugar, and then, as if pulling himself together for another effort at solution, would sternly take up the problem afresh and gaze into the bottle. He would tilt; it up one way and try td dtfnk the sugar through the cork, and, then, suddenly reversing it, try to catch the sugar as it fell out at the bottom. Under the impression that he could catch it by surprise, he kept rapping his teeth against the glass in futile bites, and, warming to the pursuit of the revolving lump, used to tie himself into regular knots arOund the bottle. Fits of the most ludicrous melancholy would alternate With these spasms of furious speculation, and how the matter would have ended it is quite impossible to say. But the monkey got loose one night and took the bottle with him; and it has always been a delight to me to think that whole forestfuls of monkeys hare by this time puzzled themselves into fits over the great problem of bottled sugar. •>i* f —"" *» t If money could be borrowed as easily *ss trouble tne world would be full of round-shouldered people.