le, but devilish sharp, and its jaw could
not have been very strong or else it would have bitten through my
ankle."

"It has pretty nearly," said Thaddy.

"It seemed to me to hit out with its claws pretty freely. That
is about as much as I know about the beast. Our conversation was
intimate, so to speak, and yet not confidential."

"The Dyak chaps talk about a Big Colugo, a Klang-utang--whatever
that may be. It does not often attack man, but I suppose you made it
nervous. They say there is a Big Colugo and a Little Colugo, and a
something else that sounds like gobble. They all fly about at night.
For my own part I know there are flying foxes and flying lemurs about
here, but they are none of them very big beasts."

"There are more things in heaven and earth," said Woodhouse--and
Thaddy groaned at the quotation--"and more particularly in the forests
of Borneo, than are dreamt of in our philosophies. On the whole, if
the Borneo fauna is going to disgorge any more of its novelties upon
me, I should prefer that it did so when I was not occupied in the
observatory at night and alone."

THE TRIUMPHS OF A TAXIDERMIST

Here are some of the secrets of taxidermy. They were told me by the
taxidermist in a mood of elation. He told me them in the time between
the first glass of whisky and the fourth, when a man is no longer
cautious and yet not drunk. We sat in his den together; his library it
was, his sitting and his eating-room--separated by a bead curtain, so
far as the sense of sight went, from the noisome den where he plied
his trade.

He sat on a deck chair, and when he was not tapping refractory bits of
coal with them, he kept his feet--on which he wore, after the manner
of sandals, the holy relics of a pair of carpet slippers--out of the
way upon the mantel-piece, among the glass eyes. And his trousers,
by-the-by--though they have nothing to do with his triumphs--were a
most horrible yellow plaid, such as they made when our fathers wore
side-whiskers and there were crinolines in the land. Further, his hair
was black, his face rosy, and his eye a fiery brown; and his coat was
chiefly of grease upon a basis of velveteen. And his pipe had a bowl
of china showing the Graces, and his spectacles were always askew, the
left eye glaring nakedly at you, small and penetrating; the right,
seen through a glass darkly, magnified and mild. Thus his discourse
ran: "There never was a man who could stuff like me, Bellows, ne