you could a dormouse; the most you can do is to provide
your spider with a clear glass bottle to live in, and teach him to come
out in response to a musical sound, drawn from a banjo or fiddle, to
take a fly from your fingers and go back again to its bottle.

An acquaintance of the writer is partial to adders as pets, and he
handles them as freely as the schoolboy does his innocuous ring-snake;
Mr. Benjamin Kidd once gave us a delightful account of his pet
humble-bees, who used to fly about his room, and come at call to be fed,
and who manifested an almost painful interest in his coat buttons,
examining them every day as if anxious to find out their true
significance. Then there was my old friend, Miss Hopely, the writer on
reptiles, who died recently, aged 99 years, who tamed newts, but whose
favourite pet was a slow-worm. She was never tired of expatiating on
its lovable qualities. One finds Viscount Grey's pet squirrels more
engaging, for these are wild squirrels in a wood in Northumberland, who
quickly find out when he is at home and make their way to the house,
scale the walls, and invade the library; then, jumping upon his
writing-table, are rewarded with nuts, which they take from his hand.
Another Northumbrian friend of the writer keeps, or kept, a pet
cormorant, and finds him no less greedy in the domestic than in the wild
state. After catching and swallowing fish all the morning in a
neighbouring river, he wings his way home at meal-times, screaming to be
fed, and ready to devour all the meat and pudding he can get.

The list of strange creatures might be extended indefinitely, even
fishes included; but who has ever heard of a tame pet rat? Not the small
white, pink-eyed variety, artificially bred, which one may buy at any
dealer's, but a common brown rat, _Mus decumanus_, one of the commonest
wild animals in England and certainly the most disliked. Yet this wonder
has been witnessed recently in the village of Lelant, in West Cornwall.
Here is the strange story, which is rather sad and at the same time a
little funny.

This was not a case of "wild nature won by kindness"; the rat simply
thrust itself and its friendship on the woman of the cottage: and she,
being childless and much alone in her kitchen and living-room, was not
displeased at its visits: on the contrary, she fed it; in return the rat
grew more and more friendly and familiar towards her, and the more
familiar it grew, the more she liked the rat