And, beyond a certain low limit, this surely is in inverse ratio to intelligence. What boy of ten would not pile up a dozen boxes in an attempt to climb within reach of it? How many would Einstein clamber upon? And how many would Shakespeare? Emily, though a fruitarian by nature, would have disdained an eagerness capable of more than two and a jump.

If you would arrive at a juster estimate of the potentialities of her race, study Emily’s conduct following upon her first uncertain inklings as to the nature of the printed word. She now never missed an opportunity of following her master into the schoolroom, where her attention became most concentrated, though unostentatiously, during the elementary reading lessons. With her, the first steps were more difficult by far than they were for her sooty classmates, but the later ones were less so. She was stimulated, moreover, in the powerful effort demanded of her in the early stages, by a new sensation, a feeling of being slightly inflated by a gas lighter than air whenever certain thoughts or memories crossed her mind. These were always connected with Mr. Fatigay. This chimp was awakening to love.

Full consciousness of it, like motor headlights suddenly leaping up behind a nightwalker in a private and violent dawn, came on her one sultry afternoon.

“What makes the lamb love Mary so?”

The children all did cry.

chirruped the infant blacks in voices which still echoed so strongly the hollow clicks of their tribal lingo that they sounded as if sticks were being drawn along a wooden paling. And,

“Oh! Mary loves the lamb, you know,”

The teacher made reply.

came Mr. Fatigay’s virile tones in response.

A choking gurgle, sadly out of tune, arose from Emily’s corner. The sound of his voice, rough and sweet to her as wild honey, took possession of the wilderness of her heart like a John the Baptist. The words, freely translated as to sexes and species, seemed to fill that desert with the suggestion that the Kingdom of Heaven was at hand. Her spirit, a caged lark which hears another in the sky, beat madly against her bars and roof of dumbness. It seemed that only one more effort was needed for her heart to spurt forth a clear, low, wood-sweet voice to harmonize with that resonant bass. A blank agony of concentration resulted. The striving creature dared not abate it, even to inhale. At what seemed the opening of realization, darkness crashed down upon her, like a cloth flung over a birdcage, and she fell forward in a momentary swoon.

As she came up out of it, into the light of consciousness and memory, she paused a little before opening her eyes, in order that she might reassemble the potent impressions which had immediately preceded her collapse. A different, and a sweeter, dizziness was superimposed upon the physical one. Still she kept her eyes fast shut, waiting, like the Sleeping Beauty, and it seemed for a hundred years, for her Prince Charming tenderly to awaken her. Then, far away, falling as from a height infinitely above the near-unnoted stridulations of the little blacks, she heard the awaited voice:

“Drag her out by the legs, and throw a bucket of water over her.”

Emily swooned again, and this time more deeply, her spirit, like Ibsen’s wounded wild duck, clinging to the cold dark mud in the depths below her consciousness.

The impact of the cold drench revived her, and having now nothing to wait for, nor finding any pleasure in arranging her returning thoughts, she rose to her feet in uncertain haste, and staggered blindly from the arid playground, heedless of the hoots and guffaws of her leaping classmates, who had all too eagerly administered the restorative. For what was such infantile derision to one on whose bowed and nakedly twitching head the laughter of the whole universe was being poured?

The chimpanzee cosmology is highly animistic, and it seemed now to Emily as if the slumbering personality of things had awakened and stood up a moment, to jeer and laugh. The bungalow grinned and looked out of its windows at her; the grass huts were doubled up and shaking. The very airs joined hands and danced in their mean mirth, and the trees threw up their top branches and rained down on her the silvery tinkle of a myriad sun-echoing leaves. For the sun’s brazen laughter was the worst of all, and to escape it the poor chimp shuffled in under the cascade from the quivering trees. Like the water of certain high falls, however, this had broken up in its long descent and had become rain, then mist, then nothing, before it reached the ground.

Here, in the dark dry-rottenness of the lower jungle, Emily found escape from the externalized form of her reverse. Here, with the powdering log, and scaly life, woodlouse and small serpent, the bright hot blood fountains from her wounded heart congealed. Soon their brittle larvae flaked away, each sob loosening a little, leaving the subject anemic but sane. It was a suddenly mature chimp that came home from those antifebrile shades, but, tight-lipped and steady-eyed, neither a shattered nor an embittered one.

There is a satisfaction in the bankruptcy of hope and self-esteem, if only it is complete enough. With only the unassailable core of the ego left, one is eased of the intolerable unconscious burden of the debt one’s faultiness owes to fortune for preserving its absurdly disproportionate, and nervous, superstructure of greed and pretension. The chimp was aware of this, having heard the schoolchildren sing, “He that is low need fear no fall,” and, indeed, having seen some of the elder ones demonstrate it very heartily, in one narrow interpretation at least.

Who would have thought, seeing the trim little brown figure trip so self-containedly through the village, or describe such a suave arc on the end of the swinging bough that landed her pat, here, back again at Mr.