90 CONFESSIONS OF A BEACHCOMBER 



fierce and destructive. A collateral circumstance revealed 

 absolute proof of its existence, which had previously de- 

 pended upon vague statements of the blacks. Cutting fire- 

 wood in the forest one morning, I came across a carpet 

 snake, 12 feet long, laid out and asleep in a series of easy 

 curves, with the sun revealing unexpected beauty in the 

 tints and in the patterns of the skin. Midway of its length 

 was a tell-tale bulge, and before the axe shortened it by a 

 head, I was convinced that here was a serpent that had 

 waylaid and surprised or beguiled a fowl Post-mortem 

 examination, however, proved once more the unreliability of 

 uncorroborated circumstantial evidence. The snake had done 

 good and friendly service instead of ill, for it had swallowed 

 a white-tailed rat — the only specimen that I have seen on 

 the island. 



Next comes the little frugivorous rat of russet brown, 

 with a glint of gold on its fur tips. A delicate, graceful 

 creature, nice in its habits, with a plaintive call like the 

 cheep of a chicken ; preferring ripe bananas and pine-apple, 

 but consenting to nibble at other fruits, as well as grain, 

 The mother carries her young crouched on her haunches, 

 clinging to her fur apparently with teeth as well as claws, 

 and she manages to scuttle along fairly fast, in spite of her 

 encumbrances. The first that I saw bearing away her 

 family to a place of refuge was deemed to be troubled with 

 some hideous deformity aft, but inspection at close quarters 

 showed how she had converted herself into a novel peram- 

 bulator. I am told that no other rodent has been observed 

 to carry its young in this fashion. Perhaps the habit has 

 been acquired as a result of insular peculiarities, the 

 animal, unconscious of the way of its kind on the mainland, 

 having invented a style of its own, "ages ahead of the 

 fashion." 



Mr C. W. de Vis, M.A., of the Queensland Museum, 

 who has considerately examined specimens of this rat, 

 pronounces it to be extraordinary, in that it combines 

 types of three genera — the teeth of the mus, the mammae 

 of the mastacomys and the scales on the tail of the genus 



