The Story of Dago | Page 2

play can't learn the ways of a human being all in one week. I was taught to ride a pony and drive a team of greyhounds, and to sit at a table and feed myself with a silver folk. One half-hour I was made to be a gentleman, and wear a dress suit, and tip my hat to the ladies, and the next I would be expected to do something entirely different; be a policeman, maybe, and arrest a rowdy dog in boxing-gloves. Oh, I couldn't begin to tell you the things I was expected to do, from drilling like a soldier to wheeling a doll carriage and smoking a pipe. Sometimes when I grew confused, and misunderstood the signals and did things all wrong, the ring-master would swing his whip until it cracked like a pistol, and shout out, in a terrible voice, "Oh, you stupid little beast! What's the matter with you?" That always frightened me so that it gave me the shivers, and then he would shout at me again until I was still more confused and terrified, and couldn't do anything to please him.
Stupid little beast indeed! I wished sometimes that I could have had him captive, back in the jungles of the old home forest, just to have seen which would have been the stupid one there. How long would it have taken him to have learned an entirely different way of living, I wonder. How many moons before he could swing by his hands and hunt for his food in the tree-tops? He might have learned after awhile where the wild paw-paws hang thickest, and where the sweetest, plumpest bananas grow; but when would he ever have mastered all the wood-lore of the forest folk,--or gained the quickness of eye and ear and nose that belongs to all the wise, wild creatures? Oh, how I longed to see him at the mercy of our old enemies, the Snake-people! One of those pythons, for instance, "who could slip along the branches as quietly as moss grows." That would have given him a worse fit of shivers than the ones he used to give me.
I'll not talk about such a painful subject any longer, but you may be sure that I was glad when something happened to the show. The owner lost all his money, and had to sell his animals and go out of the business. After that I had a very comfortable winter in a zoological garden out West, near where we stranded. Then an old white-haired man from California bought me to add to his private collection of monkeys. He had half a dozen or so in his high-walled garden.
It was a beautiful place, hot and sunny like my old home, and full of palm-trees and tangled vines and brilliant flowers. The most beautiful thing in it was a great rose-tree which he called Gold of Ophir. It shook its petals into a splashing fountain where goldfish were always swimming around and around, and it was hard to tell which was the brightest, the falling rose-leaves, or the tiny goldfish flashing by in the sun.
There was a lady who used to lie in a hammock under the roses every day and smile at my antics. She was young, I remember, and very pretty, but her face was as white as the marble mermaid in the fountain. The old gentleman and his wife always sat beside her when she lay in the hammock. Sometimes he read aloud, sometimes they talked, and sometimes a long silence would fall upon them, when the splashing of the fountain and the droning of the bees would be the only sound anywhere in the garden.
When they talked, it was always of the same thing: the children she had left at home,--Stuart and Phil and little Elsie. I did not listen as closely as I might have done had I known what a difference those children were to make in my life. I little thought that a day was coming when they were to carry me away from the beautiful garden that I had grown to love almost like my old home. But I heard enough to know that they were as mischievous as the day is long, and that they kept their poor old great-aunt Patricia in a woful state of nervous excitement from morning till night. I gathered, besides, that their father was a doctor, away from home much of the time. That was why their great-aunt had them in charge.
Their mother had come out to her father's home in California to grow strong and well. The sun burned a pink into the blossoms of the oleander hedges, and the wind blew life into the swaying branches of the pepper-trees, but neither seemed to make her any better.