might have claimed a niche in a chamber of scientific horrors, and we should at least have liked to have given him the honours of a glass case; but we could not do so for want of arsenical soap to preserve his skin, and we therefore buried Timothy just as he was.
In our next pet we advanced a few steps in the order of creation, for we tried to tame a Noombat or "banded Myrmicobius," which a native had brought us as a present; it was a little quadruped of the ant-eater species, about the size of a small cat, the fur marked in rings round the body in colours of brown and buff. But being unfortunately full grown he did not care, as a younger Noombat might have done, for making fresh acquaintances, was suspicious of bread and milk—in fact would eat nothing that we offered him, and every now and then made a noise which, without exaggeration, was very like the roaring of a bull. Altogether he was a disappointment, and when he died, after a few days spent in the attempt to tame him, we were only saved from feelings of remorse by the recollection that we had never asked the native to bring him.
But this is a digression for which I must ask pardon as there yet remains another saurian to be mentioned. Between forty and fifty miles in a south-easterly direction from our residence some young ladies of our acquaintance saw one morning what they imagined to be a pig amongst the cabbages in their father's garden. The dogs were immediately called to drive out the intruder, which, instead of taking to its heels as was expected, faced round ferociously, and disclosed in so doing the limbs and lineaments of no pig but of an enormous lizard-shaped creature
