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202 the very great annoyance caused by these animals in the earlier days of the Mission, and speaks with gratitude of a poor Irish servant who endeavoured to lessen the nuisance by making him a present of a cat.

A pair of kangaroo rats were brought to me late one evening as a gift, and though I saw my dog looking at them sideways in a manner which was inhospitable to say the least of it, yet, as she had always bestowed similar glances on all the other pets that we had ever possessed, I forgot what her sense of duty in this particular case might be, and carelessly left the rats that night in the kitchen. As might have been expected both were found next morning very neatly shaken to death, the terrier's ideas of strict justice being quite above making scientific distinctions between rats with pouches and rats without. The next rat that was given to me I introduced to the dog with a solemn injunction that the new-comer should be allowed an unmolested existence. But the rat repaid the dog's sufferance by giving himself great airs, behaving as though he was master of the house, and resenting with truculent kicks from his long hind legs the slightest difference of opinion between himself and any one of us. He was fond of hiding himself in the beds and there sleeping through the day, waking up at night exceedingly fresh and lively, and ready to follow us about the garden in a series of hops that resembled the bounding of an india-rubber ball. We ventured out with him one night beyond our fence, he hopping after us, and on returning to the house we found that our tyrant had given us the slip; at all events, we never saw him again. The announcement that he was nowhere visible on the premises seemed