Babooness

The aunt is a skinny old hag, with sharp eyes, a great deal of frizzy grey hair, that looks like a tangled mass of tow on a distaff, a turned-up nose, with large nostrils, and two rows of very perfect grinning teeth, like a monkey’s. Indeed, she principally resembles a middle-aged babooness; she is active, strong, and upright in her figure, about fifty years old.

‘Fred.’ need n’t send us any monkeys: we are afraid of them. A babooness fell in love with us once, at Barnum’s Museum: in fact, she became so much attached to us, that it was as much as we could do to get away from the affectionate ‘creetur!’

Rev. G[ilbert]. Haven, in the Christian Advocate, reports a visit to the slave quarters connected with the estate, from which we extract the following:— / “[…] I asked the mother, (dam, perhaps I ought to say, madam somebody will some time say,) ‘Who do you belong to?’ ‘Mrs. Lee.’ ‘Are you a member of the church?’ ‘Yes, the Baptist.’ ‘How many children have you?’ (Pardon me for using the word children; she talked and acted so much like a Christian mother, I didn’t like to say ‘young ones.’) ‘Seven.’ ‘Do you expect to be free?’ ‘Yes, sir; in about a year our time is up.’ ‘Do you want to be free?’ ‘Yes, sir, I do.’ ‘What for?’ ‘Because I do.’ Didn’t that reason show the woman as much as the babooness? Not being acquainted with the latter’s method of reasoning, I cannot be sure, but it struck me as a very familiar and conclusive answer.[…]”

[…] these same wild dogs being in the habit of constantly harassing any unlucky baboon or babooness that they found alone, besides having stolen into the village of the baboons at night, when dogs can see better than baboons, and killed and eaten several baboonies who were sleeping with their mothers.

She is not your wife, she is not even a woman; she was not in her conception divine, she is purely animal; she is the babooness of the land of Nod, she is the female of Cain: slay her!

Alas for the days when my baboon ancestral / In Japanese woods from the lithe limb was pendant, / Instructing, kind hearted, each babooness vestal / How best to achieve for herself a descendant.

Saturday was always a holiday, and each of us had a barrowful of nuts as pocket-money, so most of the fellows used to spend their time guzzling at the tuck-shop, which was kept by a lame old babooness in a little clump of bushes not far off; and a nice business it must have been to her, for her customers generally stole twice as much as they bought!

Uttering plaintive little cries, the “babooness” trotted back, sniffing the ground as though trying to find the trail of the lost one, and, having arrived opposite the tree which protected the two hunters, she stopped, and seemed to be staring straight at it.