I haven't any monkey now, and I don't care what becomes of me. His loss
was an awful blow, and I never expect to recover from it. I am a crushed
boy, and when the grown folks find what their conduct has done to me,
they will wish they had done differently.
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It was on a Tuesday that I got the monkey, and by Thursday everybody
began to treat him coldly. It began with my littlest sister. Jocko took
her doll away, and climbed up to the top of the door with it, where he
sat and pulled it to pieces, and tried its clothes on, only they
wouldn't fit him, while sister, who is nothing but a little girl, stood
and howled as if she was being killed. This made mother begin to dislike
the monkey, and she said that if his conduct was such, he couldn't stay
in her house. I call this unkind, for the monkey was invited into the
house, and I've been told we must bear with visitors.
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A little while afterwards, while mother was talking to Susan on the
front piazza, she heard the sewing-machine up-stairs, and said, "Well I
never that cook has the impudence to be sewing on my machine without
ever asking leave." So she ran up-stairs, and found that Jocko was
working the machine like mad. He'd taken Sue's gown and father's black
coat and a lot of stockings, and shoved them all under the needle, and
was sewing them all together. Mother boxed his ears and then she and Sue
sat down and worked all the morning trying to unsew the things with the
scissors.
They had to give it up after a while, and the things are sewed together
yet, like a man and wife, which no man can put asunder. All this made my
mother more cool towards the monkey than ever, and I heard her call him
a nasty little beast.
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The next day was Sunday, and as Sue was sitting in the hall waiting for
mother to go to church with her, Jocko gets up on her chair, and pulls
the feathers out of her bonnet. He thought he was doing right, for he
had seen the cook pulling the feathers off of the chickens, but Sue
called him dreadful names, and either she or that monkey would leave the
house.
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Father came home early Monday, and seemed quite pleased with the monkey.
He said it was an interesting study, and he told Susan that he hoped
that she would be contented with fewer beaux, now that there was a
monkey constantly in the house. In a little while father caught Jocko
lathering himself with the mucilage brush, and with a kitchen knife all
ready to shave himself. He just laughed at the monkey, and told me to
take good care of him, and not let him hurt himself. Of course I was
dreadfully pleased to find that father liked Jocko, and I knew it was
because he was a man, and had more sense than girls. But I was only
deceiving myself and leaning on a broken weed. That very evening when
father went into his study after supper he found Jocko on his desk. He
had torn all his papers to pieces, except a splendid new map, and that
he was covering with ink, and making believe that he was writing a
President's Message about the Panama Canal. Father was just raging. He
took Jocko by the scruff of the neck, locked him in the closet, and sent
him away by express the next morning to a man in the city, with orders
to sell him.
The expressman afterwards told Mr. Travers that the monkey pretty
nearly killed everybody on the train, for he got hold of the signal-cord
and pulled it, and the engineer thought it was the conductor, and
stopped the train, and another train just behind it came within an inch
of running into it and smashing it to pieces. Jocko did the same thing
three times before they found out what was the matter, and tied him up
so that he couldn't reach the cord. Oh, he was just beautiful! But I
shall never see him again, and Mr. Travers says that it's all right, and
that I'm monkey enough for one house. That's because Sue has been saying
things against the monkey to him; but never mind.
First my dog went, and now my monkey has gone. It seems as if
everything that is beautiful must disappear. Very likely I shall go
next, and when I am gone, let them find the dog and the monkey, and bury
us together.
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