Democratic Sentinel, Volume 15, Number 41, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 30 October 1891 — A Mystified Monkey. [ARTICLE]

A Mystified Monkey.

An officer in India gave his tame monkey a lump of sugar inside a corked bottle of such stout glass that it could not well be broken. The monkey was of an inquiring mind, and it nearly killed it. Sometimes, in an impulse of disgust, it would throto the bottle away out of its own reach, and then be distracted until it was given back to it. At others it would sit with a countenance of most intense dejection contemplating the bottled sugar, and then, as if pulling Itself together for another effort at solution, would take up the bottle afresh, and gaze into it. It would tilt it up one way and try to get the sugar out of the neck, and then, suddenly reversing it, try to catch the sweet morsel as it fell out, under the impression that it would capture it by surprise. It kept rapping its teeth against the glass in futile bites, and, warming to the pursuit of the revolving lump, used to tie itself into regular knots round the bottle. Fits of the most ludicrous melancholy would alternate with these spasms of furious calculation, and how the matter would have ended it is impossible to say. But the monkey one night got away, and took the bottle with it, and, ft has always been a delight to its former owner to think that whole forests full of monkeys have by this time puzzled themselves into fits over the great problem of bottled sugar. What profound theories these long-tailed philosophers must have evolved! What polemical acrimony that bottle must have provoked! And what a Confucius the original monkey must have become! A single morning with such a sanhedrim discussing such a matter would surely have satiated even Swift with satire. Charles Algernon Swinburne, the fleshly poet, has been visiting in a house in Cheltenham which was originally built for and occupied by Sir Walter Raleigh. We should think Sir Walter’s ghost would haunt him for the remark Swrfcburne once made, after going through every room in one of the London clubs, looking for one in which thgre was no tobacco being smokfed: “Xing James was a scoundrel of the deepest dye; but I honor and respect him, because he slit the throat of that other villain, Sir Walter Raleigh, who introduced the custom bf smoking in England." ' In Australia there is manufactured a hat which is said to resemble the Panama hat very closely. It is made from the unexpanded leaves of a native plant, which are immersed 1n boiling water and then dried. The fiber obtained from this treatment is plaited as in South America. A goose farm has been started in Michigan. It will be managed by a Michigander.