22 
An Undesirable Immigrant .* 
BY LUCY ROBINSON 
describing the manners and customs of 
the mongoose, as I knew him in Jamaica, 
I shall try^ to treat with fairness that na¬ 
tive of Hindostan ; not forgetting to pay 
tribute to his marvelous courage, sur¬ 
passing, it seems to me, that of any other 
animal not more than double his size. 
Often from the veranda of our bunga¬ 
low we watched him running along the bluff, resembling 
in color, shape, and leanness a common red squirrel, but, 
like the grey ground-squirrel of California, confining his 
exploits to terra firm a. 
On the other hand, his running, instead of a series of 
squirrel leaps, is a stealthy trot like the tread of a sober- 
minded cat, without loping or prancing. The mongoose 
moreover holds his bushy red tail straight out behind him, 
never letting it curl over his back like a squirrel’s. 
After we had once or twice observed the sharp-nosed, 
ferretlike animal furtively crossing the promontory 7 - below 
our rookeryq we began to understand why the roosters, the 
hens and their broods so often in broad dayfiight came 
dashing back, as if panic-stricken, from the cliff overhang¬ 
ing the Caribbean. We understood why a handsome hen, 
that started out the day r before with a dozen newly T -hatched 
chickens, now had only r eleven, the next day r only nine, and 
so on, till of all her promising brood only a solitary chicken 
responded to her despairing cluck. 
In taking up our abode at Savanna Point, on the north¬ 
east coast of Jamaica, we found ourselves in the heart of 
the original mongoose quarter; for it was at the estate im¬ 
mediately adjoining our lonely^ cocoanut walk that the 
animal was first introduced from India. In 1872, with a 
view to exterminating the cane-destroyfing rat, a native- 
somewhat imaginative—Jamaican, Hon. Bancroft Espeut, 
proprietor of Spring Garden estate, and a man of consider¬ 
able ability, at one time member of the Legislative Council 
of the island, procured two pairs of mongooses, and turned 
them loose upon his plantation. Rats were doing serious 
mischief to ymung cocoanuts, by r climbing the palm-trees 
and nibbling or breaking off the immature fruit. Girdling 
the trees with inverted tin pans failed to keep the rats 
from ascending ; but it was thought that the mongoose, 
which does not shirk from an encounter with the Indian 
* Apropos of an effort to introduce the mongoose in this State as a pest-des¬ 
troyer.- Ed. 
