As the captain and his train approached, the monkey began to tremble and chatter; but the men, not knowing how their chief might relish the joke, looked rather grave, while, I own, it cost me no small official struggle to keep down a laugh.  I did succeed, however, and merely said, in passing, “You should not play these tricks upon travellers; cast him loose immediately.”  One of the men pulled his knife from his breast, and cutting the cord which fastened the poor Spaniard to the ladder, let him scamper off.  Unluckily for the gravity of the officers, however, and that of the crew, Jacko did not run below, or jump into one of the boats out of sight, but made straight for his dear friends the marines, drawn up in line across our little hurricane-house of a poop.  Unconscious of the ridicule he was bringing on his military patrons, he took up a position in front of the corps, not unlike a fugleman; and I need hardly say, that even the royals themselves, provoked though they were, now joined in the laugh which soon passed along the decks, and was with difficulty suppressed during the remainder of the muster.

A day or two afterwards, and while the monkey was still puzzled to think what was the matter with his chin, he happened to observe the doctor engaged in some chemical process.  As his curiosity and desire for information were just such as ought to characterize a traveller of his intelligence, he crept gradually from chest to chest, and from bag to bag, till he arrived within about a yard of Apothecaries’ Hall, as that part of the steerage was named by the midshipmen.  Poor Mono’s delight was very great as he observed the process of pill-making, which he watched attentively while the ingredients were successively weighed, pounded, and formed into a long roll of paste.  All these proceedings excited his deepest interest.  The doctor then took his spreader, and cut the roll into five pieces, each of which he intended to divide into a dozen pills.  At this stage of the process, some one called the pharmacopoeist’s attention to the hatchway.  The instant his back was turned, the monkey darted on the top of the medicine-chest, snapped up all the five masses of pill stuff, stowed them hastily away in his pouch, or bag, at the side of his mouth, scampered on deck, and leaped into the main rigging, preparatory to a leisurely feast upon his pilfered treasures.

The doctor’s first feeling was that of anger at the abstraction of his medicines; but in the next instant, recollecting that unless immediate steps were taken, the poor animal must inevitably be poisoned, he rushed on deck, without coat or hat, and knife in hand, to the great surprise and scandal of the officer of the watch.

“Lay hold of the monkey, some of you!” roared the doctor to the people.  “Jump up in the rigging, and try to get out of his pouch a whole mess of my stuff he has run off with!”

The men only laughed, as they fancied the doctor must be cracked.