garden out West, near where we stranded. Then an old white-haired man
from California bought me to add to his private collection of monkeys.
He had half a dozen or so in his high-walled garden.

It was a beautiful place, hot and sunny like my old home, and full of
palm-trees and tangled vines and brilliant flowers. The most beautiful
thing in it was a great rose-tree which he called Gold of Ophir. It
shook its petals into a splashing fountain where goldfish were always
swimming around and around, and it was hard to tell which was the
brightest, the falling rose-leaves, or the tiny goldfish flashing by
in the sun.

There was a lady who used to lie in a hammock under the roses every
day and smile at my antics. She was young, I remember, and very
pretty, but her face was as white as the marble mermaid in the
fountain. The old gentleman and his wife always sat beside her when
she lay in the hammock. Sometimes he read aloud, sometimes they
talked, and sometimes a long silence would fall upon them, when the
splashing of the fountain and the droning of the bees would be the
only sound anywhere in the garden.

When they talked, it was always of the same thing: the children she
had left at home,--Stuart and Phil and little Elsie. I did not listen
as closely as I might have done had I known what a difference those
children were to make in my life. I little thought that a day was
coming when they were to carry me away from the beautiful garden that
I had grown to love almost like my old home. But I heard enough to
know that they were as mischievous as the day is long, and that they
kept their poor old great-aunt Patricia in a woful state of nervous
excitement from morning till night. I gathered, besides, that their