One look, lastly, at the animals which live, either in cages or at liberty, about the house.  The queen of all the pets is a black and gray spider monkey {88} from Guiana—­consisting of a tail which has developed, at one end, a body about twice as big as a hare’s; four arms (call them not legs), of which the front ones have no thumbs, nor rudiments of thumbs; and a head of black hair, brushed forward over the foolish, kindly, greedy, sad face, with its wide, suspicious, beseeching eyes, and mouth which, as in all these American monkeys, as far as we have seen, can have no expression, not even that of sensuality, because it has no lips.  Others have described the spider monkey as four legs and a tail, tied in a knot in the middle:  but the tail is, without doubt, the most important of the five limbs.  Wherever the monkey goes, whatever she does, the tail is the standing-point, or rather hanging-point.  It takes one turn at least round something or other, provisionally, and in case it should be wanted; often, as she swings, every other limb hangs in the most ridiculous repose, and the tail alone supports.  Sometimes it carries, by way of ornament, a bunch of flowers or a live kitten.  Sometimes it is curled round the neck, or carried over the head in the hands, out of harm’s way; or when she comes silently up behind you, puts her cold hand in yours, and walks by your side like a child, she steadies herself by taking a half-turn of her tail round your wrist.  Her relative Jack, of whom hereafter, walks about carrying his chain, to ease his neck, in a loop of his tail.  The spider monkey’s easiest attitude in walking, and in running also, is, strangely, upright, like a human being:  but as for her antics, nothing could represent them to you, save a series of photographs, and those instantaneous ones; for they change, every moment, not by starts, but with a deliberate ease which would be grace in anything less horribly ugly, into postures such as Callot or Breughel never fancied for the ugliest imps who ever tormented St. Anthony.  All absurd efforts of agility which you ever saw at a seance of the Hylobates Lar Club at Cambridge are quiet and clumsy compared to the rope-dancing which goes on in the boughs of the Poui tree, or, to their great detriment, of the Bougainvillea and the Gardenia on the lawn.  But with all this, Spider is the gentlest, most obedient, and most domestic of beasts.  Her creed is, that yellow bananas are the summum bonum; and that she must not come into the dining-room, or even into the verandah; whither, nevertheless, she slips, in fear and trembling, every morning, to steal the little green parrot’s breakfast out of his cage, or the baby’s milk, or fruit off the side-board; in which case she makes her appearance suddenly and silently, sitting on the threshold like a distorted fiend; and begins scratching herself, looking at everything except the fruit, and pretending total absence of mind, till