To set all doubt at rest about her whereabouts, some neutral monkeys, who had recently visited the Lali in a migration southward, now came to the Ammi. They informed the latter that the chief talk among the Lali was about the capture of a beautiful girl, and the quarrel of two apes over her possession. They said also that they heard it intimated among the Lali, that as the girls of the Ammi were more beautiful than those of the Lali, they had a project to capture more of them. Armed with this information and these threats, Koree now went about to rouse the infant race of men to arms. Rumor went before him, and that which had been a hint soon became an assertion. Horrid tales of captured maidens filled the imaginations of Cocoanut Hill. The young women were especially interested, some hoping they would escape capture, and others that they would not. The old men and women were indifferent, especially as babies were not to be captured. But the young men were easily aroused, especially those who had lovers, and they determined to defend their own. A league was, therefore, entered into by the young men of the Ammi, which the older men soon after joined, to proceed, like the united princes of Greece, to recapture the stolen maiden and restore her to this earlier Menelaus. Another and older siege of Troy was thus planned, which, like many battles greater than Homer’s, was lost to history, and can now be restored only by meager relics saved from the past. Let us then proceed, Homer-like, to build up the history of this war, as the mammoth has been rebuilt by putting together here and there a bone, and as Roman history has been constructed by inspecting coins and broken statues. Greater battles are lost than any that are retained in history. The greatest throes of earth and of its inhabitants have escaped even tradition, and are now to be exhumed only from the forgotten. We dig up history as we do potatoes, and wonder that so much activity has been buried. History is now built from this end, and long periods of forgetfulness are being reclaimed. Like the bridges which span the Mississippi, we throw up great highways across prehistoric periods, and prospect in times and lands beyond the known. CHAPTER XVII. [Illustration]