VORACITY AND TAMENESS OF A PIKE. 243 



heads, and refuse bits of meat from the kitchen, and 

 upon one occasion I saw him take a kitten, a live 

 one of a month or more old, and swim about the 

 pond with it, shaking it in his mouth, just as a terrier 

 would shake a rat. 



His appetite was enormous, and to try his digestive 

 powers I one day collected a quantity of live frogs 

 in a watering-pot, and gave him at one meal, in the 

 space of about ten minutes, no less than sixteen full- 

 grown, frogs. His appetite seeming still good, I got 

 from a nest I knew of five or six young half-fledged 

 torn-tits, and having tied them together by their necks, 

 threw them in to him, when to my astonishment he 

 bolted them also. How much more he would have 

 eaten I know not. We had, however, no more food 

 at hand for him. 



So tame was he that I have seen him take a frog 

 from the end of a long pole. It happened one day 

 that some painters, who were at work in the house, 

 sent a little boy to clean a paint brush. The little 

 fellow, quite unconscious of what was about to happen, 

 stooped down to wash it in the pond, when, in a 

 moment, bang at it came the pike, to the great dismay 

 of the boy, who ran crying and howling into the house, 

 no doubt thinking that the devil had got out of his 



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