and when we had so far gained his trust as that he would eat bread and milk whilst we were looking at him we felt quite triumphant. His fur was rather long and extremely soft and silky, of a very pretty grey colour, and his tail somewhat shorter than a cat's. It is a fur which is very effective when bordered or lined with rose colour, but if exposed to much wear it soon becomes shabby. The strangest-looking part of him was his hind legs, which very much resembled those of a fowl, and made him appear as if he was an intermediate cousin of both birds and beasts. He came of a family that is given to burrowing, and my husband gave him, as he thought, an unexceptionable home in the bottom of our dining-room cupboard; but our ungrateful pet might have contained the very soul of Baron Trenck himself, to judge from the way in which he at once set to work to mine through the wall into our bed-room. I forget where we secured him afterwards, but the ruling spirit would not be repressed; he had a passion for sapping and mining, which he practised to such an extent that we might be thankful he did not bring the house down. Just as we had succeeded in making him devoid of all anxiety in our company, and quite content in the evening to join the family circle together with the other members of our ménagerie, it so happened that he found the house door open, and strolling out, was perhaps seized with a fit of home sickness, for we never saw him afterwards. Our attention having been occupied at the time with affairs of importance we did not at first miss him, and the disappointment that we felt at our loss, when we discovered it, was greater than we might have experienced for a more engaging creature, on
