OUR PETS. 157 



of infantine arms ! Almost everybody lilies to look at 

 tadpoles, little merry black imps, wriggling up and down, 

 some with tails, some with none, some like little balls, 

 others with tiny feet beginning to sprout, always in 

 motion, and always merry, and at last disappearing in 

 some mysterious way, just when one expects to have a 

 dozen or so of infant frogs to disj)ose of. This disappear- 

 ance of one's reptile pets is, it must be acknowledged, apt 

 to be annoying, not that they are ever found, but that 

 people will keep grumbling about " these nasty creatures " 

 crawling about the room, and insisting on it that they are 

 dangerous and poisonous, and that they don't like such 

 creatures at large in the sitting-rooms. A lizard with a 

 family of young ones once disapj^eared in this way, to my 

 great regret ; she was kept in a large china bowl, among 

 damp earth, carefully covered in by a glass shade ; the 

 mother grew tame enough to take flies from the hand, while 

 the young ones got a spray of a rose-bush covered with 

 aphides shaken among them every morning. They lived 

 thus some weeks, and then disappeared, no one, of course, 

 acknowledging to having lifted the cover, or touched the 

 bowl. This difficulty, impossibility rather, of preventing 

 people from vieddliug with what they profess to be only 

 looking at, is a sore subject to most collectors and keepers 

 of curiosities ; boxes are opened just for a peep, covers are 

 removed and carelessly replaced, and then the doers of 

 the mischief turn round upon the hapless naturalist and 

 blame him for filling the house with creeping things, 

 when he would be but too thankful to have his newts, 



