The jungle is full of wild fruit trees newly burgeoned, but the monkeys prefer the cultivated varieties, they have found out the improved flavour even in the young leaves. They find out everything, not merely for the purposes of honest burglary, but for the cynical satisfaction of tearing it to pieces. Thus, for one graft that a monkey devours, he pulls three out of their bandages and casts them on the ground, where they are of no further use to either men or monkeys. What you plant with infinite pains they pull up by the roots. “These people have done something; let us undo it,” is the one thought they ever think,--which shows, I suppose, that if there are politics among them they govern strictly on party lines. It makes one very ill-disposed toward them. A monkey has entered the pantry and bolted with a jam-pot even while my back was turned giving out the sugar to make more jam. A monkey has come in at the verandah door and abstracted _all_ the bread and butter for afternoon tea, while his accomplice sat upon the paling to gibber “Cave!” This was legitimate larceny, and we put up with it. Thisbe said the poor monkey looked hungry, and she would be content with Madeira cake, adding, out of the depths of her experience, that it was a pity the monkey that took the jam hadn’t taken the bread and butter too,--they went so well together. We can be indulgent to an entirely empty monkey; we have enough in common with him to understand his behaviour, and his villainous pirate’s descent upon us is always good comedy. But when he picks the slates off the roof of your dwelling, when he privily enters your husband’s dressing-room and abstracts the razor and strop--Tiglath-Pileser, who would not lend his to a seraph!--what kind of patience is there which would be equal to the demand? Monkeys do not throw stones and break windows; one wishes they would, since that would bring them within the cognizance of the police and it might then be possible to deal with them. A monkey would hate solitary confinement above all things. Often in a troupe bounding from tree to tree overhead across the Mall there will be one with a collar and a bit of rope or chain hanging to it, escaped from capture and free again to range with his fellows the limitless lunatic asylum the good God has endowed for him in the jungle. Once he became amenable to that sort of punishment he would forsake for ever, I am sure, the haunts of men; but he is not intelligent enough, or perhaps he is too intelligent.