Wollet as he prepared to go, “if you stopped to think what prodigies of superhuman patience are performed in this zoological garden, you would never find the heart to use the word yourself.”

The curator smiled at his departing back. “Sentimental bosh!” he muttered and again occupied himself with Yppa whom he insisted on calling “Lily.”

One day, however, he had another narrow cage wheeled up to Yppa’s prison. It was just such a cage as that in which they had brought Yppa months before. In it was a gigantic male orang.

The curator and all the keepers watched the meeting of the two creatures with bated breath.

But nothing happened.

Yppa did not move from her post by the wall. Zato, whom they called “Bobby,” crouched down in one corner of his cage.

The men waited and waited. Neither animal stirred from its place.

A tremendous self-restraint, a tender and insurmountable modesty kept them from betraying to human eyes the thrilling experience of this meeting.

But the next morning they were sitting side by side. With the unconcern of affection, they sat with their arms around each other’s neck and shoulders. They were silent, apparently peaceful, gazing with worried eyes into space.

This went on for days, weeks, months.

They imparted to each other the incomprehensible and terrible turn of life which had forced them into this horrible barrenness of confinement. They were stirred by the similarity of their fates, grasping only the fact that they were both unfortunate.

A gloomy wildness persisted unchanged in them, binding them one to another. They would sit motionless for hours, giving the impression that they were plunged in melancholy thought. There would follow outbreaks of hostility to their keeper—savage but not frenzied, not even angry, rather as if they were the result of mature reflection. They could not comprehend that the terrific energy with which they resisted was all in vain.

Sometimes they succeeded in escaping. In their dreams. Once more they were in the wonderful, damp, humid jungle, swinging along the lianas to the tops of the trees, shaking the fronds of the coco-palms while gigantic brilliant-colored flowers flamed around them, and huge gorgeous butterflies flashed by. A thousand bird voices screeched, cackled, tittered, whistled about them. The well-known sound of every creature that stole or galloped or fled or quarreled or rejoiced or fought, filled their ears and suffused their senses with familiar music, and they were intoxicated with a kind of happiness that only the free can feel. They enjoyed this intoxication in all its purity while they were asleep, for in their dreams they forgot their captive state.

But when sleep forsook them and they opened their eyes in the wretched restriction of their prison, they felt an unutterable despair.

It was still dangerous for their keeper, or even for the curator, to enter Yppa’s and Zato’s barred cell. No one had ever dared to.

But now Tikki had come.

The newborn babe rested in Yppa’s raised hands, and she examined it as a merchant might consider a bit of choice ware in an oriental bazaar. For the first time in the course of her captivity something like happiness dawned palely in her soul.

Though Tikki had been on this earth a bare half hour, he seemed a thousand years old. He looked like a mummy with his meager body and scrawny neck, and especially his wrinkled face. In the sleepy, liquid expression of his eyes there was something inexplicable, unfathomable.

His mother was satisfied with him. She rocked him in her arms and seemed about to show him to Zato. But Zato was not there. Probably they had driven him into another cage.

Yppa did not waste much time thinking about it. She applied herself to little Tikki with all the matter of fact and serious intentness of a mother orangutan. For the first time she forgot her cage, forgot her rage and rancor, forgot her bitter longing for the jungle.

Now all her powers of pacification were directed to little Tikki who stirred at his mother’s breast, looking at once ineffably shrewd and pitiably helpless.

At that early hour the house in which their cage stood was empty. Neither the curator nor any of the keepers had yet put in his appearance.

But Yppa was not alone with Tikki.

She had a tiny observer, one so tiny, indeed, that Yppa did not even notice her. Two eyes, hardly bigger than a pin-head, dark, sharp and clever, eagerly followed every movement of the mother and child.

In a little crack where the floor of the cage joined the wall sat Vasta the mouse.

She had often sat in that crack, certain that she was not observed, yet trembling each time with excitement. After the spectacle that she had just witnessed, she trembled more excitedly than ever.

Of course, nature had designed her to be timid, to tremble and to flee. But here in the zoological garden where so many big animals lived in captivity, Vasta knew the pride of a free creature and was on a fairly familiar footing with all the imprisoned beasts.