on Jacky began to show another inclination which he had not before manifested, one less foreign to his nature it is true than the beer, but even more injurious to his reputation as a harmless domestic kangaroo, one in feet fatal both to our peace and to his own. We were now continually disgraced by the accounts which were brought us of his having spent whole nights in grazing in our neighbours' gardens and cornfields, reports which were sadly strengthened by his often appearing at breakfast with no appetite whatever, and with his coat whitened over with hoar frost; and yet we could not bear to follow the suggestion which was freely offered to us that it would be the best plan to keep him imprisoned in a little yard, with a chain round his waist like a monkey, until the harvest was ripened and got in. We determined instead to send him to some people living in the bush who had no crops to be injured, and who promised that he should be well looked after until he could return to us and the stubble-fields. Poor Jacky never lived to see either again; he pined away when parted from his old friends, and I am afraid that his end was hastened by being deprived of beer, and that he sank a victim to an artificial want.
Eating the neighbours' corn, however, is not the only cause that I have known alleged for dismissing a kangaroo. In a settler's family at the distance of a few miles from Barladong a strange freak was played by a petted kangaroo, as if in emulation of that traditional monkey which, according to one version, carried off Oliver Cromwell from his nurse, and by another account of the legend is stated to have stolen a young Fitzgerald.
