Rensselaer Republican, Volume 17, Number 52, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 3 September 1885 — Monkeys at Breakfast. [ARTICLE]

Monkeys at Breakfast.

An English gentleman who lived in India during his early life tells .an amusing story of some pranks played by monkeys. They were almost as tame and playful as kittens about his home, and says there were a great number of them. He says: “I was married in India, and engaged for our home a house fourteen miles or so from any other habitation of white Then. On the morning of our arrival my wife went to change her traveling dress, while the servants laid breakfast on the veranda overlooking the river. At the clatter of the plates there began to come down from the big trees that overshadowed the house, and up from the trees that grew in the ravine behind it, and from the house roof itself, from everywhere, a multitude of solemn monkeys. They came up singly, and in couples, and in families, and took their places without noise or fuss on the veranda, and sat there like an audience waiting for an entertainment to commence. And when everything was ready, the breakfast all laid, the monkeys all seated, I went in to call my wife. “Breakfast is rteady, and they are all waiting,” said I. “Who are waiting?” she asked in dismay. “I thought we were going to be alone, and I was just coming out in my flressing-gown.” “Never mind,” I said. “The people about here are not very fashionably dressed themselves. They wear pretty much the same the year ’round.” And so my wife came out. Imagine, then, her astonishment., In the middle of ‘the veranda stood our breakfast, and all the rest of the space, as well as the railings and the steps, l were covered with an immense company of monkeys, as grave as possible, and as motionless and silent as if they were stuffed. Only their eyes kept blinking, and their little round ears kept twitching. Laughing heartily, at which the monkeys only looked all the graver, my wife sat down. “Will thev eat anvthing?” said she. “Try them,” I said. So she then picked up a biscuit and threw it among the company. Three hundred monkeys jumped up in the air like one, and just for one inBtant there was a riot that defied description. The next instant every monkey was sitting in its place as solemn and serious as if it had never moved. Only their eyes winked and their ears tw'itched. My wife threw them another biscuit, and again the riot, and then another, and another. But at length we had given away all that we had to give, and stood up to go. The monkeys at once rose—every monkey on the veranda—and, advancing gravely to the steps, walked down them in solemn procession, old and young together, and dispersed for the day’s occupation.— Brooklyn Union.