At Home with Wild Nature 



would like some additional evidence of his wonderful 

 mentality. 



I have seen an injured stoat feign death and heard 

 many stories of the cunning of this bloodthirsty little 

 beast whilst in pursuit of its prey, but have only met 

 one really trustworthy observer in a position to verify 

 from personal experience the widely known assertion 

 that in order to attract birds within its reach it will 

 double up its body and roll about like a ball. My 

 friend, whilst dressing one sunny spring morning, had 

 his attention attracted by a great hubbub in the garden, 

 and looking out of his bedroom window was astonished 

 to see a small reddish-brown ball emerge from a rockery 

 and roll slowly down a grassy slope towards a shrub- 

 bery. It was surrounded by a mob of chirruping, 

 chattering, excited house sparrows, drawing nearer and 

 nearer to the object of their curiosity. Upon nearing 

 the shrubbery the ball suddenly became elongated and 

 sprang like a flash at the nearest bird, but missed it by 

 a hair's-breadth. The sparrows all took wing instantly, 

 and a much-disappointed stoat trotted off through the 

 garden. 



The common brown rat is a great thinker, consider- 

 ing the limited size of his brain, and is able to make 

 clever mental deductions from information gathered by 

 his acute sense of smell, as I have proved by innumer- 

 able experiments. The slightest scent of the human 

 hand is at once detected by the olfactory nerves of a 

 rat, and, however hungry he may be, if he happens to 

 be an individual of highly developed mentality in his 



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