I thought it would be a good chance for me to take a peep into her room, so I ventured to swing over and drop down on the window-sill beside her, on all fours.  I did it very quietly, so quietly, in fact, that I do not see how she could possibly have been disturbed; yet I give you my word, Ring-tail, that woman shrieked until you could have heard her half a mile.  I never was so terrified in all my life.  It paralysed me for an instant, and then I sprang up by the vines to the lightning-rod, and streaked up it faster than any lightning ever came down.  Once in my room, I shook all the rest of the evening.

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Matches said that Miss Patricia was probably worse scared than I was, but that’s impossible.  I never made a sound, and as for her—­why, even the cook came running when Miss Patricia began to shriek, and she was in the coal-cellar at the time, and is deaf in one ear.

But Matches always disagreed with me in everything, and I was not sorry when we parted company.  I’d better tell you about that next.  It happened in this way.  Stuart came into the room one day with Sim Williams, one of the boys who was always swarming up the stairs to see us.  Sim was older than Stuart, and one of those restless, inquiring boys, never satisfied with letting well enough alone.  He was always making experiments.  This time he wanted to experiment on me with a handful of tobacco,—­coax me to eat it, you know, and see what effect it would have.  But Stuart objected.  He was afraid it might make me sick, and proposed trying it on Phil’s monkey first.  So they called Matches, and the silly little beast was so pleased and flattered by their attention that she stood up and ate all they gave her.  She did not like it, I could see that, but they praised her and coaxed her, and it turned her head.  Usually I received the most attention.

It did not seem to hurt her any, so Sim offered me some.  But I would not take it.  I folded my hands, first over my ears and then over my eyes.  Then I held them over my mouth.  Stuart thought it wonderfully smart of me, and so did Sim, when he found that it was a trick that Stuart’s grandfather had taught me.  The old man had an ebony paper-weight on his library table, which he called “the three wise monkeys of Japan.”  They were carved sitting back to back.  The first one had its paws folded over its eyes in token that it must never see more than it ought to see, the second covered its ears that it might not hear more than it ought to hear, and the third solemnly held its paws over its mouth, in order that it might never say more than it ought to say.

Stuart thought that I had forgotten the trick.  He told Sim that it was the only one I knew.  I was glad that he had never discovered that I am a trained monkey.  If he had known how many tricks I can perform life wouldn’t have been worth living.  It would have been like an endless circus, with me for the only performer.  As it was, I was made to go through that one trick of the wise monkeys of Japan until I was heartily disgusted with it, or with anything else, in fact, that suggested the land of the Mikado.