XXI 
A FRIENDLY RAT 
Most of our animals, also many creeping things, 
such as our “wilde wormes in woods,” common 
toads, natterjacks, newts, and lizards, and stranger 
still, many insects, have been tamed and kept as 
pets. 
Badgers, otters, foxes, hares, and voles are 
easily dealt with; but that any person should 
desire to fondle so prickly a creature as a hedgehog, 
or so diabolical a mammalian as the bloodthirsty, 
flat-headed little weasel, seems very odd. Spiders, 
too, are uncomfortable pets; you can’t caress them 
as you could a dormouse; the most you can do 
is to provide your spider with a clear glass bottle to 
live in, and teach him to come out in response to 
a musical sound, drawn from a banjo or fiddle, 
to take a fly from your fingers and go back again 
to its bottle. 
An acquaintance of the writer is partial to adders 
as pets, and he handles them as freely as the 
schoolboy does his innocuous ring-snake; Mr. 
Benjamin Kidd once gave us a delightful account 
of his pet humble-bees, who used to fly about his 
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