168 
The Animal-Lore of Shalcspeare’s Time . 
Gonzalo describes, under its native name, another, 
and perhaps the strangest of the New-World animals, 
the Opossum:— 
“ The Churchia is as bigge as a small conie, tawnie, sharp-snowted, 
dogtoothed, long-tayled like a rat. They doe great 
harme to their hennes, killing sometimes twentie or 
more at once to sucke their bloiid: and if they then have young, shee 
carrieth them with her in a bagge of skin under her belly, running 
alongst the same like a satchell, which shee opens and shuts at 
pleasure to let them in and out: and if any come with light when the 
damme and young are at their hen-bloud dainties, shee receives them 
into this bagge and runneth away with them. And if shee finde the 
way stopped, shee climeth up above the hen roost, and is sometimes 
taken alive or dead in this manner, as I have seene.” ( Purchas , 
vol. iii. p. 995.) 
Another traveller, Girolamo Benzoni, a Milanese, writes in 
a work published at Venice in 1565:— 
“ There exists also a monstrous animal, that has a pouch under its 
stomach, into which it makes the young ones get when it wants to go 
from one place to another ; this animal has the body and the snout of a 
fox, with fore paws and hind feet like those of a cat, but more handy, 
and its ears are like those of the rat.” (.History of America , reprint, 
Hakluyt Society, 1857.) 
From one of these descriptions Du Bartas probably 
derived his exaggerated notions of the formidable nature 
of the opossum :— 
“ I fear the beast bred in the bloody coast 
Of Cannibals, which thousand times (almost) 
Ee-whelps her whelps, and in her tender womb, 
Shee doth as oft her living brood re-tomb.” 
(Divine Weekes, p. 50.) 
