Mick looked at me, and I looked at Mick; and then the two of us burst into a roar of laughter as we followed up the chase to see the end of it. We arrived just in time. Jocko, who, as may be supposed, was the originator of all the row, had got up into the mulberry-tree, the cockatoo's own especial domain, and, chattering and making faces at the bird, had clutched hold of one of his legs in his hand-like paw, trying to pull him from his perch. This `Ally Sloper' resisted with all his might and main, hanging from a branch of the tree with the claw that was free, while he pecked and bit the monkey with his nut-cracker beak, making Jocko wince and snarl and pull all the harder to get him into his clutches, the cockatoo screaming like mad, as I have said, all the while! "Lor'!" exclaimed mother, holding up her hands at this sight, just as we came up, "it ain't Squeers's cat after all! How ever did that there monkey get here?" "It must have broken loose from some place near," said Jenny. "The milkman told me this morning that Smith, the fancier, had one the other day which crammed a lot of cinders down the baby's throat and nearly killed it, and that Mr Smith was obliged to get rid of it." "Then, this can't be that chap," said father, sitting down in his old armchair under the tree and looking up at Jocko, who had released `Ally Sloper' on our approach and gone up aloft in one of the topmost branches. "I'd bet 'arf-a-crown now, Sarah, as how them two youngsters here could tell us summat o' the monkey if they likes!" He had a sharp eye, had father, and had caught Mick winking at me. So, there being now no longer any need, or indeed chance, of concealment, especially with Jenny's eyes fixed on him, Mick thought it best to make a clean breast of it at once. "Coom down out o' thet, ye divvle. 'Tenshin, Jocko!" cried he, patting his shoulder, to which his friend the monkey at once jumped from the tree; and then, turning to my sister, he said, with a roguish look in his black eyes, "Oi've brought ye a little prisint, Miss Jenny, ez Oi hopes ez how ye'll be afther acceptin'." Jenny smiled. "What," said she--"a monkey?" "No, Miss Jenny," replied Mick, grinning, while Jocko chattered in sympathetic glee. "He ain't a monkey at all, at all. Sure, he's what I calls a Saint Michael's canary!" This was a settler for all of them; father leaning back in his chair and holding his sides, while mother and Jenny enjoyed the joke as much as we could both wish, `Ally Sloper' adding to the merriment of us all by shrieking out at intervals alternately, "Say-rah! Say-rah!" and "Blest if I don't have a smoke!" in father's very own voice.