Puslapio vaizdai
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Dot, Mab would follow me about the garden and closely imitate whatever pranks the monkeys indulged in.

My simian pet, Dot, an Osengi, was the smallest type of monkey in Africa, and I often carried him in my pocket, from which he would peep out every now and then to see if I were still there, and then curl up contentedly again in the pocket.

Dot had the prettiest little delicate, rose-tipped fingers imaginable, and lovely white hands, like a baby's. I have never seen anything so pretty and dainty as this pet of mine, although he was not as exuberantly affectionate as Dinkie, whose boisterous play, I often suspected, was the cause of Dot's death. Some persons, however, might imagine that the scientific name of the tiny primate was enough to kill it: "Circopithecus tritu

berculata" is a mouthful not easily digested.

Dinkie, whose every act was always imitated in order by Dot and Mab, was a Nictitanus monkey. Perhaps because it was a form unknown in the jungle, Dinkie was afraid of a trellis, and I taught her to go up one. Her playmates seriously regarded her efforts and promptly followed. They maintained. the same order in climbing on my knee, and if Dinkie sometimes whined a remonstrance against being put to bed, Dot immediately joined his little voice in protest also.

Three little hammocks swung in my house for these jungle guests, but Dot and Mab would never enter theirs until Dinkie was in hers, and every time she moved they did likewise. We would all nap every afternoon, when Dinkie had

a habit of peeping out of her hammock to see whether I was in mine. Immediately two pairs of bright eyes from the other hammocks noted Dinkie's movement and copied it. I had also built three diminutive cages for my pets, but Dot preferred to share Dinkie's cage and left Mab to her solitary housekeeping.

I had hoped to bring these lovely little specimens to America with me, but they upset my calculations and their own precedent, too, by dying, for Dinkie was the last to depart for the monkey's Happy Jungle.

My winged and four-footed wild neighbors in Africa looked upon me as a protector and regarded my place as an asylum of refuge. I believe they all knew that I never allowed any creature to be shot within a mile of my house, except hippopotamuses, buffaloes, or vicious animals that proved unsafe visitors. Therefore, all the wild life of the bush came around me, and my objection to having them molested in my dooryard, as it were, so disappointed an explorer from the British Museum, who came to visit me, that he set up his camp on the opposite side of Lake Ntyonga.

The most desirable large specimens, however, possibly through some animal foresight, do not frequent the dooryards of men. Our hunters killed, more than a mile from our camp, the biggest gorilla ever obtained for me; but, native-like, they came and protested that they could not bring in the body of the beast that night, as the spot was too far away and lay across a stream. On the other hand, I knew that unless the gorilla was secured immediately there would probably be little of it left in the morning. So I commanded four boys to take two lanterns and go after the animal. My assistant accompanied them, and the giant gorilla was lashed to a pole by its feet and borne to safety.

This method of carrying game was employed generally, the pole being supported by two or four men, as might be required. In the case of an elephant or bush-cow, as buffaloes are termed by the natives, and any beast too large to be carried by four or five men, it was our practice to skin the animals on the spot and take the hide to our work

rooms, where it was treated with arsenic and then put into brine. For this purpose we had brought half a ton of salt, a quantity of arsenic, several gallons of alcohol, and other necessary chemicals in the seven or eight tons of supplies that constituted our outfit.

No matter where they were killed or captured, all specimens of birds and animals were brought for treatment to the base camp, where I had a workroom in an annex to the house. Here were shelves, barrels, and boxes, and as soon as one receptacle was filled, we would ship it.

When an animal was brought in, my native boys would spread it on bamboo mats laid on the ground. Here it would be skinned, and the meat, if edible, apportioned among the natives. We had trained negroes to do this work, but it was necessary for a white man to stand over them with a club in order to enforce proper attention. It is necessary to cut out, in little flakes, with scissors, the superficial fascia from the feet. Many a naturalist has lost skins by not knowing this important part of preservation. The natives must also scrape the flesh from skins very carefully. One boy I had became an expert at the preparation of skins, and he was so skilful that I bore with his equally clever thieving propensities.

We would keep the skins in the air until they were thoroughly dry, and would stuff small animals, such as rodents, with cotton, and wire their tails. This was not done in a way to preserve the form of the animal, but merely to prevent shrinkage. We sometimes stuffed big birds with grass, and smaller ones with cotton, and wired their heads, beaks, and legs in order to keep them from either stretching or shrinking.

Naturally, great care had to be observed in handling the skins of birds. Some of the most beautiful in our collection were hawks, of which a great variety existed in the neighborhood of Ntyonga. Indeed, the native name for my former home at American Point signified a bird that abounded there, "Nyandwe," the horn-bill tucan.

As we progressed in our work we saw scores of different kinds of birds, among which were five or six varieties of the

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The plain near the author's house where chimpanzees day after day would come out of the forest in full view of the working natives

most brilliant kingfishers I have ever seen. They were like jewels in the radiance of their beauty, and no more appropriate setting for their vivid plumage could have been found than the carpet of tiny blue flowers that spread a solid mass of color over my lawn. These beautiful blossoms resembled little violets, but they were no larger than a gun-cap and grew on a plant much like clover, that clung flat to the ground. Here and there splashes of yellow in the blue showed where a mass of small blossoms grew that were the shape of a telephone-horn, no bigger around than a lead-pencil, and of a glowing yellow hue. Again, a flat-growing purple purple flower, like a pea-blossom, formed a pattern of purple in the sapphire expanse that made an exquisite surface when the grass had been cut and raked away from above the flowers. One does not require much imagination to realize how colorful a scene was formed by this bright-hued lawn, the sky-reflecting ex

panse of Lake Ntyonga, a hundred yards beyond, and the S-shaped walk to the lake, where pineapples bordered path and flower-beds, and a glory of wings swept the space above. Adding even more life to the scene were antelopes, which timidly left the forest, only thirty yards distant from my house, and sought to pilfer the scanty products of my garden.

By way of precaution against wild marauders, I had fenced in the vegetable garden and saved most of the tomatoes, which were plentiful, and cantaloups, cucumbers, and radishes. But fences are no protection against birds, and certain of my feathered neighbors exhibited a fondness for radishes that was without parallel. They persisted in eating the seed before these were ripe, and I finally had to take a bat-net and construct a frame over the radishes. Even then small birds would crawl under the net and proceed to feast on a dainty imported from America.

It is not surprising that birds like my garden products, for there are few native vegetables, and of these the yam is not accessible, and the mbuma, a kind of egg-plant, is bitter. Natives make a palatable dish of it by cooking it in grease or stewing it with meat.

But the birds that invaded my garden did not include the turraco, or "plantain-eater," of which we brought to America a hundred specimens of three or four varieties. It has never been clear to me why this bird is called "plantaineater," because it never eats plantains.

Of the turracos that haunted Ntyonga the largest and most beautiful is the ogalungo, which is on the order of a peacock, and which is called the pao (peacock) by some white men. The native words oga, king, and lungo, copper-rod, have been combined to form a name that signifies "King copper-rod," or "Copper King." The bird has legs that glow like burnished copper rods, which may have suggested the native nomenclature, and many rich tints of bronze gleam in its very beautiful, brilliant plumage, the

general effect of which is metallic blue. The ogalungo has a tail like that of the pea-hen and carries it in the way that a pea-hen does. It never grows as long as the tail of a peacock, and is never spread out after the fashion practised by the bird that symbolizes vanity.

Among English people the ogalungo is nicknamed "bully-cock," but the natives, with their usual picturesqueness of perception, have seemed to choose the most appropriate name for this gorgeous creature.

One peculiarity about the bird is that when it alights upon a tree it always does so running on a limb, and it seems to fly from limb to limb when it is, in reality, running. Its movements are so swift that, while on its feet, it has all the appearance of flying.

That so lovely a creature should be slain for its flesh seems a shame, and I admit that I hated to kill the pretty things. But we did shoot a lot of them, for the flesh is excellent after the bird has been hung up for eighteen or twenty hours.

(To be concluded)

Discoveries

By IRENE RUTHERFORD MCLEOD

I went into the green wood,
As I have gone before

Thinking to find my childhood's mood
That I shall find no more.

Bluebells were there, and wind-flowers,

That I had come to see,

A million trees shall rise here,
And rot, and rise again;
My changing flesh shall die in fear,
And be renewed in pain.

Flower and flesh and green tree

Changeless in changing are;

And kingcups wet with shining showers, The invisible dust which habits me

And buds on every tree.

Robin, thrush, and blackbird

Sang as in other days,

But those were other songs I heard In these familiar ways.

Golden light from the same sun

Dappled the same track, But I, oh, I had traveled on,

And could not there come back.

Flowers, birds, and wide earth,

Suns and worlds unseen

When springs and eons have come to birth,

Shall be as they have been.

Burns in the morning star.

Dust into dust resolves death,

And dust again shall rise,

But man's soul breathes creative breath
For all that lives and dies.

From matter's tireless dust mill,
Finite infinity,

From cycling death, by love, thought, will,

O soul, thou art set free!

I went into the green wood;

I found a dream had fled:

I could not find my childhood's moou:

I found my soul instead!

Life and Letters of Sir Wilfrid Laurier

By OSCAR DOUGLAS SKELTON

"It was Laurier's fortune, and Canada's, that he was in control of the country's affairs at the most creative and formative period in its history. For all time his name will be linked with Canada's attainment of industrial maturity and national status."

IX. LAURIER IN OFFICE.

AFTER eighteen years' wandering in the wilderness of opposition, for half the time under Laurier's leadership, the Liberal party came into power in 1896. For fifteen years, the longest unbroken stretch of power in the country's annals, Wilfrid Laurier was prime minister of Canada. These fifteen years were years crowded with opportunity, a testingtime sufficient to search out every strength and every weakness of the leader or of his administration. It was Laurier's fortune, and Canada's, that he was in control of the country's affairs at the most creative and formative period in its history. For all time his name will be linked with Canada's attainment of industrial maturity and national status.

The victory of the Liberals in the general election of 1896 was not surprising. The swing of the pendulum was not notably operative in Canadian politics in the first half-century of confederation, and yet it had its effect. Time brought to the ship of state barnacles and dry rot, as it brought to the passengers the desire for a change. This would not have overcome the tremendous advantage which in Canadian elections fell to the party in power, with its henchmen in office, its newspapers subsidized by government advertising, its opportunities to milk subsidies and contracts for campaign funds, had it not been for more specific factors working in the same direction.

The Conservative party had lost its great chieftain on the morrow of the election of 1891. Sir John A. Macdonald had been prime minister of the dominion for twenty of its twenty-four years. In the next five years the Conservative

party had four different leaders, and the dominion four prime ministers. None of them was of Macdonald's stature. Sir John Abbott was a shrewd lawyer, but more at home in court or councilroom than on the floor of the House or on the hustings. Sir John Thompson was an able and honest administrator who was growing in strength and breadth of view and living down the prejudice felt against him because of his conversion from Methodism to Roman Catholicism, when death cut short his career. Sir Mackenzie Bowell, a faithful party man and one-time grand master of the Orange order, could not hold his ministers in control, and was forced by the "nest of traitors" to make way for a stronger leader. Sir Charles Tupper, summoned in 1896 from London, where he was acting as high commissioner, took up the task, but not even his bulldog tenacity could restore unity to a party shattered by intrigue.

The revelations of long-continued and wholesale corruption in the public works department had "made Tammany smell sweet" in comparison. For the moment the revelations of similar misdoings on the part of the Liberal government of Honoré Mercier in Quebec enabled the Conservative party to answer tu quoque, but in the long run it suffered most in public esteem.

The national policy was losing its grip. Protection had been given a fair trial; it had not brought and kept the prosperity that was guaranteed. The people hesitated to try the drastic remedy of unrestricted reciprocity with the United States, and feared the specter of political annexation in the background; but when in 1893 the Liberals in national convention modified their policy to that of a tariff for revenue and limited reciprocity

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