The snake is a deadly enemy of the lizard, and though I did not particularly like to find even the pretty little bronze lizard amongst my clean clothes, nor hidden away in boxes through which I was accidentally searching, nor on my hair, nor holding tight with its delicate fingers on the nap of a coat, nor sticking upon the opposite wall to confront our eyes on first opening them in the morning; in each and all of which places I have found or seen the lizards, yet, knowing that they and we had one grand common antipathy, I made the best of their undesired familiarity. It may be, also, that in selecting a residence the lizard takes care to avoid such as are frequented by scorpions; at all events during five years a solitary specimen that we killed upon our sofa was the only scorpion that we ever saw.
But if even a bronze lizard could look uncanny when it came upon me unexpectedly, what can be said of its cousin the "Mountain Devil," whose name science has by no means softened, as ugly creatures have a right to expect, but has actually gone out of her way to make worse, changing its common appellation to "Moloch horridus!" This ill-used creature possesses, both in the position of the thumbs on its fore paws and also in changing its colours when out of health, somewhat of the character of a true cameleon; and now that I speak of character it is right to add that, excepting in its appearance, the bad name it has received is wholly undeserved, for it is a meek inoffensive little lizard; and has the one grace of the toad, a pair of pretty eyes, with a further resemblance to that last-named reptile in the wide shape of its stomach.
