permit the toy to be retained. Its excessive liveliness at night destroys not only the sleep of the household, but also all its crockery, for the creature plays such antics when it is shut up within four walls, that nothing of a brittle nature is safe which can be thrown down, or broken by articles upset upon it from above; in fact, I am disposed to think that a bull would prove himself but mild and inoffensive in a china shop, compared with what could be effected by two good active opossums. Also when Bishop Salvado says, in his description of Australian animals, that he has had many tame opossums at the Mission-house, and that they play without doing any harm—"senza ledere"—the unavoidable inference of readers who know the sports most in favour with domesticated opossums is that the Benedictines either had no plates at all, or were restricted by their rule to the use of wooden trenchers only.
The first opossums that I ever saw were two young ones which had just been given to some children, who had placed them in an advantageous position in a little tree at the back door of their father's house, and then stood surveying their new property with great pride. The opossums, meanwhile, dazzled by the broad daylight, were looking as sleepy as owls, and as incapable of voluntary movement as clothes hung upon a bush to dry. A few days afterwards I met the father setting out on a long walk, with a basket on his arm containing the identical opossums, which he was intending to let loose at the farthest point of his destination. Had he taken the apparently obvious course of turning them out of doors near his home, the cat-like attachment of the opossum to
