248 AUDUBON THE NATURALIST. 
to the ground, ceases to move, and appears to be 
dead! He turns it on its back, and perceives 
on its stomach a strange apparently artificial 
opening. He puts his fingers into the extraor 
dinary pocket, and lo! another brood of a dozen 
or more young, scarcely larger than a pea, are 
hanging in clusters on the teats. In pulling the 
creature about, in great amazement, he suddenly 
receives a gripe on the hand—the twinkling of 
the half-closed eye and the breathing of the crea- 
ture, evince that it is not dead, and he adds 
a new term to the vocabulary of his language, 
that of “ playing ’ possum.” : 
Like the great majority of predacious animals, 
the opossum is nocturnal in its habits. It suits 
its nightly wanderings to the particular state of 
the weather. On a bright starlight or moonlight 
night, in autumn or winter, when the weather 
is warm and the air calm, the opossum may 
everywhere be found in the Southern States, 
prowling around the outskirts of the plantation, 
in old deserted rice fields, along water courses, 
and on the edges of low grounds and swamps; 
but if the night should prove windy or very 
cola, the best-nosed dog can scarcely strike a 
trail, and in such cases the hunt for that night is 
soon abandoned 
The gait of the opossum is slow, rather heavy, 
and awkward; it is not a trot like that of the 
