There are so many of them. A monkey census is obviously impossible, but I believe if it could be taken it would show that every resident official had at least one simian counterpart,--a statement which I hope will not give offence on either side. An old fakir on the top of Jakko keeps a kind of retreat for monkeys, a monastery with the most elastic rules, where indeed the domestic relations are rather encouraged than forbidden. He is their ghostly father, though responsibility for their morals seems to sit upon him lightly; he will call them out of the jungle for you in hundreds to be fed. Then you give him four annas and come away. A pious Hindoo, with sins to expiate, would doubtless give more, and the fakir would profess to spend it in grain for the monkeys. Here, by the way, we have an explanation of the incorrigibility of monkeys which has not hitherto occurred to ethnographers: they consume all the sins of the pious Hindoos. So they thrive and multiply and gambol all over this town of Simla, its house-tops and shop-fronts, its gardens and its public places, with none to make them afraid. There are two small brown ones sitting on the paling looking at me at this moment, knowing perfectly well that I will never interrupt the flow of my ideas to get up and chase them away. Of course we try to make Atma responsible, and he declares that he persecutes them without ceasing, but we know better. He claps his hands at them and shouts, “Go, brother!” and that is all he does. And brother goes, to the next convenient branch. We have given Atma catapults and he tells us that he uses them every morning before our honours are awake, but we are certain that he hangs them on a nail. And indeed I do not think monkeys would be very shy of a house defended by mere catapults. Atma, however, has taken this business of Tiglath-Pileser’s fruit trees seriously. He had carefully protected every tree and graft with thorns, but the monkeys slid their hands in underneath, and reached up, and tore down the young shoots with great strips of the tender bark as well. He was angry at last, was Atma, and he asked for a gun. “You would kill a monkey?” we exclaimed, “you would break your one commandment?” and Atma cast down his eyes. “They are _budmash_,” said he (a wicked and perverse generation), “and they eat the work of we people. Why should they not be killed?” “No,” said the sahib, “you are a good churchman”--or words to that effect--“I know that you will not kill a monkey.” And we both looked at him piercingly. “Nevertheless,” said Atma, cheerfully and shamelessly recanting, “it would be well that a gun should be. A gun is a noise-making thing. These _bundar_-people have no shame, but it will appear to them that here a gun is, and they will not come. Also,” he added ferociously, “for that long-tail apple-eating wallah, I will put a stone in the gun.”