desolate, at once the genius of life and the holder of the dreadful scales after death, more potent than the ibis, and guardian of all the approaches to hundred-gated Thebes. A reverend pair, truly, and sadly come down in the world.
Do they know it? It is hard to say. They inherited their sad faces, no doubt, from some sad-faced progenitor; but how came he — the primitive ape — by so mournful a countenance? Did some tremendous catastrophe in the beginning of time overtake the four-handed folk, — so terrible in its ruin, that the sorrow of the survivors was impressed forever upon their features and transmitted by them to their kind? Everything, we are told, is inherited. The farmyard goats, when doing nothing else, still perch themselves on the highest point of the bank they can find, or on the wall, because their wild ancestors used once upon a time to stand on the hill peaks, as sentinels for the herd, to watch for the hunter and the eagle and the lynx. The dog still turns himself round before going to sleep, because in the old wolf days his progenitors, before they lay down, cautiously took one last look all round them. Is there, then, any reason in the far past for the melancholy demeanor of the monkeys of the present?
Perhaps they still remember the Flood with personal regret.
It is impossible to speak with disrespect of animals having such antecedents; and, besides, this monkey before you knows perhaps a secret that science cannot find out — the secret of the Sources of the Nile. As he passes by, a tail hanging down from the perch above him attracts his notice, and pulling it, he brings down upon himself a monkey smaller than itself, which had
