THE SELBORNIAN ABROAD. 
213 
nearly made an end of him, and turning the old maxim of “ Love 
me, love my dog ” into “ Hate my dog, hate me,” he would have 
little to say to me till the last week of his short life, when he 
again made friendly advances. 
Poor Billy ! About three weeks ago he was missed one day 
when he was called to dinner, and after a night of suspense, during 
which the gardener “ could hardly sleep,” and his boy tasted 
his first sorrow, Billy was discovered wedged in among the 
pipes in their underground passage, where, apparently, he had 
found the heat too great, had been unable to return, and had 
been suffocated. He lived beloved and died lamented, and 
rests in a primrose-strewn grave beneath the garden wall, at the 
head of which his virtues are writ, not in water but in lead 
pencil, by the loving hand of his mourning playfellow. 
Two reflections arise : First, that if Billy accommodated 
himself so easily in the open garden in summer and even in 
winter in the moderate heat of a vinery, mongooses might be 
easily domesticated in our kitchen, where they would do excel- 
lent service as mousers, and where their cleanly and tameable 
and affectionate habits would make them almost rivals of the 
harmless necessary cat ; and, secondly, that if Billy had been 
a little less unmistakably foreign, his appearance might have 
been taken as proof of the existence of an animal in our farms 
which would have no right to a place there. As, however, the 
most patriotic of naturalists has never included the mongoose 
among our British quadrupeds, there is no doubt he must have 
escaped from confinement somewhere, though we never could 
find where. 
Hampstead. B. W. S. 
THE SELBORNIAN ABROAD. 
RAVELLING has become so ordinary an event in the 
lives of many of us in these days of swift steamers, 
that the time has almost come for the organisation of a 
bureau of advice to those who prefer natural history 
interests to art and antiquities, which are well enough described 
in the ordinary guide books. Voyages to remote and semi-civi- 
lised lands are undertaken for health, for sport, for sightseeing, 
and for “ mere cussedness ; ” and it cannot be widely enough 
made known to such travellers that though the vertebrata and 
the flowering plants and ferns of these lands may be thoroughly 
worked out, there yet remain the great fields of many groups of 
invertebrata and of cellular cryptogams waiting exploration. 
The mosses, algae, fungi and lichens of many readily accessible 
places are known to us after the most imperfect fashion. Col- 
lections of such from the West Indian Islands, from almost any 
