Now, what is the scent of the musk-rat like? When I was last at home in 1875, I went into a greenhouse on a hot summer day, and found it given up to the musk-plant. ‘Muskies! muskies!’ I exclaimed, as I fled from the stifling, dank, and fetid atmosphere. Get up that combination—a hot day, a dank, humid, and suffocating greenhouse given up to the musk-plant, and you will have the full effect of only one full-blown musky. The odour of the plant, heavy when close, is delicate when diffused; the scent of the musk-rat, on the other hand, is heavy when diffused, and insupportable when near. The marvellous diffusibility of this odour is illustrated in many ways. It has long been maintained that the musk-rat has only to pass over a closely corked bottle of wine to destroy its contents. I have tasted sherry so destroyed, and at the same time have placed corked bottles of water in the runs of musk-rats without any defilement. The odour won’t permeate glass, so the bottle of sherry must have been contaminated by a defiled cork. Place a porous water-goblet (_sooráhí_) in the run of a musk-rat, and defilement is secure; and if that goblet endures for a hundred years, it will during that century affect all water which may be put into it. These animals seem to enjoy communicating their disgusting odour to surrounding objects. It doesn’t follow that mere contact conveys it, for I have often handled these animals without contamination; but there is undoubtedly—setting aside the scent-bottle as a means of defence—an instinctive marking of objects for purposes of recognition, sheer mischief, or for the easing of the secretion organ. Another anomaly pertains to this animal: though so disgusting to others, it is not so to itself; and it is one of the tidiest and most cleanly of animals. Its nesting arrangements, too, are very peculiar; nothing is more greedily utilised than paper, which it tears up. Some years ago, I lived in a boarded house, and used to be nightly worried by a pattering and purring musky dragging a newspaper towards a certain corner. Arrived there, it disappeared down a hole and pulled the paper after it—that is, as much as would enter the hole. If I gently removed the paper, the inquisitive nose would appear ranging round the hole, and shortly after, the animal itself in quest of the paper. I had the boarding taken up, and there, in a paper nest, lay five pink and naked muskies, all heads, with hardly any bodies, and quite blind. I cannot find one redeeming trait in the character and conduct of _Sorex cœrulescens_, and I must admit that he is an ill-favoured beast, and of questionable utility. A DAY IN EARLY SUMMER.