justification of the preposterous color of his skin, the ludicrous clothing he wore, or his queer ways. In the middle of Africa he found himself a natural solecism, a “sport,” as botanists say, from the normal type, — a lusus naturæ, an interesting monstrosity.
The savages, therefore, would solemnly proceed to discover Stanley, and after deliberate examination pronounce him, in Brobdingnagian phrase, to be simply a relplum salcath — something, in fact, which they could not understand, but which they considered very absurd. Meanwhile, what with taking his clothes off and putting them on again to please his explorers, and beating up the various articles of property, socks and so forth, which different households had appropriated as curiosities, the traveller found his time so fully occupied that his notes of the other manners and customs of the natives were often of the briefest description, and he had to go on his way, considerably out of countenance at finding that, while he thought he was discovering Central Africa, the Central Africans were really discovering him.
Something of the same feeling grows upon the observer after a morning with monkeys. We, on the one hand, remark the pensive demeanor of the four-handed folk, and sympathize with the unknown causes of their melancholy, — are amused by their irrational outbreaks of frivolity and scandalized by their sudden relapses from an almost superhuman gravity and self-respect into monkey indecorum and candor. But while we are watching one of them it suddenly occurs to us that we ourselves are being watched by the rest, and that as we take notes of the monkeys so they take notes of us.
They, no doubt, remark that our faces are usually
