left home together one night in order to see the world. The chaperon knocked at our door on her return very late and alone, leading us to suppose that she had lost her young charge; we were therefore somewhat surprised next morning to find near the house, in the branches of a peach-tree, the poor débutante, looking very miserable, drenched with dew and half-blinded with the rising sun. I handed back to Possie her progeny, which she seemed not a little pleased to dry and comfort; but the next time that she took it out she lost it altogether.
She had now acquired such a taste for dissipation that she could not be content unless spending every evening abroad, and our endeavours to keep her within doors on moonlight nights were frustrated by her biting a hole in the thatch of her own apartment. This act was soon supplemented by her choosing for herself a more distant sleeping-place, which we could never discover, and for about a year she paid us visits nearly every night, knocking as usual at our door to be let in to supper, but maintaining a strict reserve as to where she lodged, a fatal secrecy that eventually caused us to lose her.
Whilst she had occupied the little room and the carpet-bag we had always been able, on leaving home for a few days, to commit the charge of her to Rosa; not that the arrangement pleased either party, for Rosa revenged on all opossums a bite through her thumb-nail which she had once received from a wild one, and Possie, having wit enough to feel herself disliked, lost no chance of retaliating, and would even run at Rosa like a cross dog. But when Possie insisted on a separate establishment, it was difficult to have her cared for in our accidental absence, and so at
