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I forget all these worries when I am below with my gibbons. They are the most entrancing animals I have ever known. The black and white pair that live together sing me a duet every time I go near. They have an amusing way of sharing their food, and especially their drink. When I give them a dish of milk, or of tea, the white one, with the longest arm, dips his wrist into it, and then just as he gets a lick off his fur, the little black fellow takes his wrist away and licks it himself. Often, when one has a fist full of grapes or banana, the other will eat out of the other fellow's hand instead of taking some for himself.

We separated the pair of Sumatran orangs today. The female is a glutton, and a bully, and has her poor mate so hen-pecked that he is afraid to take a morsel of food for hi self. She will grab as many as seven bananas - sometimes putting three in her mouth at one - to keep him from having any. One of them now has the cage that the big Mawas Kuda had before he died.

We are having banana troubles - either great bunches of them turn rotten overnight, or there are none ripe at all. Today all bananas aboard are green, and we are hard to put to it to find substitutes. Davis has some birds that will eat nothing else, such as hornbills and fruit pigeons, though he is gradually breaking them in to melons and grapes. So he gets the few that can be found, and the rest of us have to feed pumpkins and sweet potatoes, which nobody likes quite as well. The Borneo orang is a joy. He eats anything at all, plays with straw and chews on it if there is nothing else available, and waltzes with joy every time he sees me coming down the line with a tray of food.

September 12 - 

The Mediterranean, as a winter cruise, must be something of a disappointment if these few days of September weather have been a fair sa mple. Days have been cold, rainy, and windy; the sea gray with white-caps. Today was a bit better, in fact I stretched out on Number 3 hatch for a sunbath this afternoon, and enjoyed a game of deck tennis in the [[strikethrough]] after [[/strikethrough]] evening. We have built a regular tarpaulin tent around the giraffe to keep out the breeze, and they seem happy so far. Even the little one is now drinking canned milk, and they all eat well.

The female blue sheep kicked her way out of her cage yesterday, and danced all over the ship before anybody noticed her. When I went below to give the gibbons tea, she was tied on top of Number 5, feeling very frisky, and waiting for Gaddi and Jennier to nail her cage together again for her. It's a good thing it wasn't the male who got out, as he is rather a mean devil. If y u put your hand in his cage to pet him, he always tried to smash you with his horns. But the female is a regular pet.

The birds in Number 6 continue to thrive, and we need have no temperature worries about them. The palm oil stored below our animals has to be heated, and is not at a temperature of 100, so that the deck under our cages is warm to the touch, and the temperature of the hatch is that of midsummer.