Read "A Menagerie Aboard" by Rudyard Kipling online for free on Textopian. Full text with search, annotations, highlights, and AI-powered reading aids.
It was pyjama time on the _Madura_ in the Bay of Bengal, and the / incense of the very early morning cigar went up to the stainless skies. / Every one knows pyjama time -- the long hour that follows the removal / of the beds from the saloon skylight and the consumption of _chota / hazri_. Most men know, too, that the choicest stories of many seas / may be picked up then -- from the long-winded histories of the Colonial / sheep-master to the crisp anecdotes of the Californian; from tales of / battle, murder and sudden death told by the Burmah-returned subaltern, / to the bland drivel of the globe-trotter. The Captain, tastefully / attired in pale pink, sat up on the signal-gun and tossed the husk of a / banana overboard.[3]
"It looked in through my cabin-window," said he, "and scared me nearly / into a fit. " We had just been talking about a monkey who appeared to / a man in an omnibus, and haunted him till he cut his own throat. The / apparition, amid howls of incredulity, was said to have been the result / of excessive tea-drinking. The Captain's apparition promised to be / better.