go for you, like three
hundred wild cats.

[Illustration: Tasmanian Devil!]

[Illustration: THAT IDEA.]

The Tasmanian method of taming it is to blow it into space with a heavy
charge of buckshot; and this seems to be the only way of rendering it
quite harmless. In life the Tasmanian devil has one desire, one belief,
one idea--general devastation. Herein, perhaps, he is the superior of
the kangaroo, who doesn't have ideas. There is a superstition that once,
in distant ages, a kangaroo had an idea, and if you closely observe a
kangaroo who is left to himself, you may see something in that
superstition. Ever since the time of that idea (which, of course, the
kangaroo forgot) the whole race of kangaroos has been trying desperately
to remember it. Whenever a kangaroo finds himself alone, and unobserved,
he addresses himself to recollecting that idea. He gazes thoughtfully at
his paws, finding no inspiration. Then, he tries the vacant air above
him, with equal ill-success. He brown-studies at the fence, at the
ground, at his own tail; he will never, never rescue that lost idea
(which is probably a most insane one, not worth rescuing), but he is
always persuading himself that he is on the very point of catching it;
frowning and turning his head aside as though the words were in his
mouth but wouldn't come off the tongue. You will also notice that he
wrestles desperately with it in his sleep, with his fore paw over his
nose. If in his waking efforts he sees you watching him, he instantly
assumes an air of alert wisdom, intended to convey the belief that he
has known all about the idea for years, and is only thinking about
applying it in some practical way or making a book of it. But the
attempt is a failure--those ears give it away. For intellectual pursuits
the kangaroo is not fitted. But he _can_ jump; and the disconsolate
grasshopper, whose hind-leg copyright the kangaroo has infringed, is far
behind the record. It is, in fact, reported of an educated West Indian
that, visiting New South Wales and encountering his first kangaroo, he
sat down immediately to write an essay on the unusually large
grasshoppers of Australasia.

[Illustration: THOSE EARS.]

Whether or not a serious naturalist is justified in excluding from a
chapter on marsupial animals a careful and detailed consideration of the
bookmaker and the 'bus-conductor, I will not stay to argue. I refrain
from dealing at length with these interesting creatures in