FLYING FOXES 
VERY one interested in bats should make a 
point of taking a morning ride along the 
Westcott Road, Madras, in order to see the 
flying foxes going to bed. In a compound 
within a stone’s-throw of the Club are some tall casua- 
rina-trees which form the dormitory of the frugivorous 
Cheiroptera of Royapettah. Since a bat has no clothes 
to take off when it goes to bed, having merely to fly up 
to a branch, catch hold of it with the hooks at the 
posterior end of the wings, and then let itself hang, the 
process of retiring for the night, or, rather, the day, 
should not be a long one. Nor would it be if these 
winged mammals were amiable creatures. But, alas! 
more cross-grained, surly brutes do not exist! It is 
one of the strangest freaks of Dame Nature that she 
should have granted wings—the emblems of purity—to 
one mammal only, and that the most unclean, loathsome, 
and ill-tempered of them all. 
Some time after the sun has shown himself above 
the trees, and long after the fowls of the air are up and 
doing, the flying foxes begin to think of going to bed. 
These great creatures, the expanse of whose wings is 
over a yard, come sailing up from all directions, and, for 
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