Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: June 19, 2025
If they came into the house Mamma would be frightened. But I would not be frightened. I should stroke them." "Do you think," Uncle Victor said, still politely, "you quite know what you mean?" "I know," Daniel said, "she means opossums." "Yes," Mary said. "Opossums." "What are opinions?" "Opinions," Papa said, "are things that people put in other people's heads. Nasty, dangerous things, opinions."
She kept trying to talk to us about Pincher, and trains and Australia, but we were determined she should be quiet, as she wished it so much, and we restrained our brimming curiosity about opossums up gum-trees, and about emus and kangaroos and wattles, and only said "Yes" or "No," or, more often, nothing at all.
The walls were festooned with all sorts of birds' eggs, carefully blown out and strung on a thread. The chimney piece was covered with stuffed squirrels, raccoons and opossums; and the shelves around were likewise crowded with specimens, among which were fishes, frogs, snakes, lizards, and other reptiles.
Only one kangaroo had been shot since we left the Dawson, although their tracks were met with every where. Charley had taken several opossums; the presence of these animals generally indicates a good country. The nests of the white ant were rarely seen; but the soldier ant, and the whole host of the others, were every where.
Perhaps the most curious and interesting habit recorded of the landrail is that of feigning death when suddenly discovered, a method of self-defence which it shares with opossums, spiders, and in fact other animals of almost every class. It will, if suddenly surprised by a dog, lie perfectly still and betray no sign of life.
Large blocks of granite crested the summits of the hills, and their slopes were covered with Acacia thickets, and arborescent Hakeas and Grevilleas. A dwarf Acacia, with rhomboid downy phyllodia, an inch long, grew between the rocks. The natives were busy on the hills, cutting out opossums and honey. We heard their calls and the cries of their children.
Notwithstanding this similarity of pattern, it is obvious that the hind feet of these several animals are used for as widely different purposes as it is possible to conceive. The case is rendered all the more striking by the American opossums, which follow nearly the same habits of life as some of their Australian relatives, having feet constructed on the ordinary plan.
There were a number of opossums here which often damaged the garden produce in the night. There were various dull-plumaged small birds, with hawks, crows, and occasionally ducks, and one abominable croaking creature at night used to annoy me exceedingly, and though I often walked up the glen I could never discover what sort of bird it was.
If the three localities where the most ancient mammalia have been found Purbeck, Stonesfield, and Stuttgart had belonged all of them to formations of the same age, we might well have imagined so limited an area to have been peopled exclusively with pouched quadrupeds, just as Australia now is, while other parts of the globe were inhabited by placentals, for Australia now supports one hundred and sixty species of marsupials, while the rest of the continents and islands are tenanted by about seventeen hundred species of mammalia, of which only forty-six are marsupial, namely, the opossums of North and South America.
All around me, there, was joyous with life; the locust sang amidst the herbage; the cranes gambolled on the banks of the creek; the squirrel-like opossums frolicked on the feathery boughs. "And what," said I to myself, "what if that which seems so fabulous in the distant being whose existence has bewitched my own, be substantially true?
Word Of The Day
Others Looking