of visitors, I almost leaned against the cage in my eager watch of the
movements of the gorilla. I fancied him roaming his native African
jungles, the terror of every living thing, or rearing, with a strange
grotesque solicitude, his young family. I wondered how much akin to
human love and hate were the passions that raged beneath that hairy
breast, and how much of real feeling was in the loud and anguished howl
that occasionally burst from those fanglike jaws. Thus speculating, I
drew incautiously near the bars of the cage where the monster
restlessly paced up and down, and was inexpressibly startled at feeling
his hot breath on my cheek, while from his huge, hairy lips came the
sound--"Sam!" I actually jumped with astonishment, whereupon the
creature beseechingly said: "Hush, hush, for Heaven's sake do not leave
me!" I mustered courage enough to ask what all this meant. The gorilla
answered: "I am your old friend, Jack Gale; don't leave me."

So Coriander's famous gorilla was no other than my old crony, Jack
Gale.

And this is how Jack happened to be a gorilla:

Coriander's keepers were too watchful to permit much conversation, but
taking from the gorilla--for such he still was to me--the address of
Jack Gale, No. 1283, Morusmulticaulis Street, I went home to revise
some of my deductions relative to the origin of the human species,
founded on observations of the gorilla in a state of comparative
wildness. The menagerie closed at ten o'clock in the evening, and
precisely at half-past ten I was at Jack's lodgings, to which I climbed
up four flights of crooked and very dark stairways. The room was small
and cheerless; the windows were carefully guarded by thick curtains;
three or four swinging bars depended from the ceiling for the practice