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Updated: May 5, 2025
The most valued of these treasures were a small animal called a Mangouste, and a cage containing a family of white mice. These white mice were greatly prized by De Vonville, on account of the rare manner in which they were marked, their paws and muzzles being of a perfect jet black.
"And who in the room opposite, on this floor?" "Empty now. Two dark-featured little gentlemen had it for a fortnight, Jews, I reckon, and as like one another as two spots of dirt on this 'ere pane of glass. Spoke a hard-biled kind of tongue, and was furriners, I guess. Polyanders." The vacant room would just suit De Vonville, who had arrived a few days before from abroad.
For the Mangouste and the mice, the parrots and the blasphemous macaw, I engaged temporary board and lodging with a bird-and-rabbit man in the neighborhood, telegraphing De Vonville that I had departed from lodgings forever, lodgings for single gentlemen, without board.
Seeing the interest I took in his small menagerie, De Vonville begged me to undertake the superintendence of it, on his being called away for a brief tour to Baltimore and elsewhere, in pursuance of an engagement to deliver a course of traveller's tales.
I told him of it, and he came in the next day, bag and baggage, a portion of which latter was curious and uncommon. De Vonville, with whom I had lived in lodgings two or three years previously, was a Belgian and a savant, and a man of rare companionable qualities besides. Professionally, I believe, he called himself a naturalist.
There were personal reminiscences connected with Mungo which rendered him particularly valuable to De Vonville, whom he had often saved from the stings of the noxious vermin to be encountered by those who dwell in tents. His instinct was for creeping things, though he looked as if he could have dined contentedly on a brace of white mice.
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