136 ANIMAL SKETCHES. CHAP. 



sleepy, sitting at the bottom of his cage, nodding his 

 head, a poor, silly blue-bottle fly (no doubt of tender age 

 and not versed in the natural history of the Vesper- 

 tilionidse) would walk with innocent confidence under 

 and over the bat, passing nose, ears, and eyes without 

 danger. But the moment he touched the sensitive mem- 

 brane of the bag, it closed upon him. And thence there 

 was no retreat. The cruel, sharp teeth of the bat soon 

 substituted for imprisonment, rapid death. 



Dear old Gilbert White of Selborne, has in his eleventh 

 letter some observations which I cannot refrain from 

 quoting. " I was much entertained," he writes, " last 

 summer with a tame bat, which would take flies out of a 

 person's hand. If you gave it anything to eat, it brought 

 its wings round before the mouth, hovering and hiding its 

 head in the manner of birds of prey when they feed. 

 The adroitness it showed in shearing off the wings of flies, 

 which were always rejected, was worthy of observation, 

 and pleased me much. Insects seemed to be most accept- 

 able, though it did not refuse raw flesh when offered ; so 

 that the notion that bats go down chimneys and gnaw 

 men's bacon, seems no improbable story. While I amused 

 myself with this wonderful quadruped, I saw it several 

 times confute the vulgar opinion, that bats when down 

 upon a flat surface cannot get on the wing again, by 

 rising with great ease from the floor. It ran, I observed, 

 with more dispatch than I was aware of ; but in a most 

 ridiculous and grotesque manner." 



I dare say some of my readers will remember ^Esop's 

 fable of the battle between the beasts and the birds. As 

 Mr. Dallas reminds us, the moral of the fable is tacked on 

 to the conduct of the bat. Availing himself of the com- 

 bination of wings and a furry mouse body, that astute ani- 

 mal hovered ovdr the field of carnage, and joined by turns 



