The Minds and Manners of Wild Animals: A Book of Personal Observations

"These displays I placed on a high shelf in the kitchen, where he could get them with difficulty. I think that he thought himself very clever when he stole anything. He never would eat anything stale. He was extremely fond of fresh lemon jelly, but he never would touch it after the second day. He loved roses, to eat, more than anything. The more beautiful they were, the more he liked them, but he never would eat faded roses. He never cared much for nuts of any other kind than baked peanuts, save walnuts. I found that nuts gave him dreadful spells of indigestion. USE OF TOOLS. "He knew what hammers and chisels were for, but for obvious reasons we never encouraged him in anything to do with carpentry. With cocoanuts he was very funny. He knew that they had to be broken, and he would try to break them on the floor. When he found he couldn't manage that, he would bring the nut to one of us and try to make us understand what he wished. If we gave him a hammer he would try to use it on the nut, and on not being able to manage that, he would give back to us both the hammer and the cocoanut. GAMES AND PLAY. "We never taught him any tricks; he simply acquired knowledge himself. A game he was very fond of was to pretend he was blind, shutting his eyes very tightly, and running around the room knocking against tables and chairs. . . . We found that exercise was the thing he required to keep him in health, and my nephew used to give him plenty of that by playing hide and seek with him in the morning before breakfast, and in the evening before dinner,--up and down stairs, in and out of all the rooms. He simply loved that game, and would giggle and laugh while being chased.... If he saw that a stranger was at all nervous about him, he loved running past him, and giving him a smack on the leg,--and you could see him grin as he did so.