Mrs. Wiles now and then stops for breath, although, like most Londoners, she talks without apparently using any, and this, on our first exchange of confidences on the matter, enabled me to ask why she thought the monkey-house query was always propounded. "I don't know," she said, "but I suppose it's because to most people the Zoo is monkeys first and foremost. It's the monkeys they want to see. But Wiles has nothing to do with monkeys, nothing whatever. Wiles has charge of the apes. I won't go so far as to say I don't sometimes wish it was lions or elephants, but this I will say, that, good husband as Wiles is, I don't think I could live with him if it was monkeys pure and simple--although how anyone can call them pure and simple, I can't think. Apes are different, aren't they, sir? Wiles says that apes are the next things to us. Wiles says they have brains and beautiful natures; but what gives me most peace of mind is knowing that they haven't got tails. Tails would be too much, as I often tell him. I've got a bit of writing about it which Wiles found in a dictionary, and if you'll permit me, sir, I'll bring it round and show it to you to-morrow morning. I always keep it in the Bible, handy." Mrs. Wiles unfolded it the next morning and I read aloud these words: "In common use the word ape extends to all the tribe of monkeys and baboons, but in the zoological sense" ("Ah!" said Mrs. Wiles, smoothing her apron) "it is restricted to those higher organized species of the Linnæan genus _Simla_, which are destitute of a tail, as the ourangs, chimpanzees, and gibbons." "There!" she said triumphantly, when I had finished. Our opportunities for conversation with Mrs. Wiles come after breakfast, for it is one of her duties to clear away. Wiles and she appear to live close by, and she moves between the two houses, first getting Wiles his breakfast, packing him off to his apes, and "redding up" her own home; then locking her door and "redding up" the Misses Packers'; then returning to prepare Wiles's and her own dinner; and in the late afternoon returning to the Misses Packers' to help them with theirs and ours. Wonderful creatures, women! There is nothing done by men to put in the balance against such steady undeviating dreary mule-work as women cheerfully perform. At least, not in England. On the Continent you get something like it, in the small hotels where a man does everything; but not here--not in the land of public-houses. The Misses Packer, our tutelary twins, although aware that in Mrs. Wiles they have a treasure, deprecate her volubility in our rooms. Like all consciously refined persons, they have no appreciation of character, and both Miss Laura and Miss Emma have separately apologized to us for their hireling's familiarity and hoped we will not allow her to impose upon our good nature. What is to be done with people like this?--and they are everywhere.