It is high time to tell you that Jack was a dear, pretty little monkey of the chimpanzee kind, with tiny, delicate hands, nervous and semi-transparent, almost like a sick child’s. He was no bigger, the whole body of him, than a pocket-handkerchief, and you could have easily hidden him inside your hat. He was slim and slender, daintily made, with narrow chest and sloping shoulders—a creature all nerves, with a wonderful little pale phiz of his own, puckered and wrinkled, and long, drooping eyelids, greyish-white, and as thin as an onion skin, that slowly, rhythmically, opened and closed over brown eyes ringed with yellow. He bore the solemn, serious look of those who suffer; his eyes seemed fixed on something beyond the visible world, and now and again he would pass his long, dry fingers across his eyes as if to wipe away a tear. He seldom gambolled, and never indulged in the grotesque contortions of other apes; their restless, ceaseless activity seemed foreign to his nature, and even his grimaces had nothing in common with theirs. Noise scared him; he was never angry, but habitually silent and thoughtful. He preferred to lurk alone in dark corners, where he would spend long hours, squatted on his tail, almost motionless, dreaming sadly of some mysterious, unattainable future. But, for all his unlikeness to his colleagues and their comicality, his queer little crumpled, wrinkled face never failed to produce its effect on the spectators. Jack was perfectly irresistible; no one _could_ look at him for any length of time without bursting out laughing. His aspect was at once so piteous and so ridiculous, his gaze so pathetic and so grotesque, his deadly earnestness so side-splitting, while his eyelids would droop suddenly ever and anon in so anxious and appealing a wink, that the result was comic beyond belief. An old, old man’s head on a baby’s body, a mask that was for ever changing, twitching, wrinkling, with eyes that looked out grave, intense, solemn, from beneath a low, flat brow crowned by what looked for all the world like a wig! The louder the merriment he excited, the more serious Jack became. On show days, while the audience was convulsed with mirth, the gravity of his mien, the careworn look in his eyes, over which the lids dropped mechanically at regular intervals, as if weighed down with their load of melancholy, reached the acme of fantastic absurdity.