When the smaller _Taraquira_ died, redoubled care was bestowed on the survivor, but unfortunately, we could not transfer the Brazilian climate to a London residence, and my _Taraquira Smith_ only lived long enough to display that peculiar and yet not vicious instinct of letting you know that its tail was armed throughout its entire length with those sharp prickly scales. One more lizard-pet deserves an obituary notice. ‘I have a horned toad from Texas down at my office,’ said an Ohio editor to me, when I was visiting in that State. ‘Will you like to call in and see it, when you pass that way?’ The reader will surmise that a very short time elapsed ere I did ‘pass that way;’ and my friend the editor bade me welcome by beginning an immediate search for the ‘horned toad,’ which apparently was allowed the free run of the office. Has the reader ever been introduced into the office of a Western newspaper editor? A chaos of ‘exchanges’ is its principal characteristic. You wonder how one man in a lifetime, much less a week—this was the office of a weekly paper—could look over and ‘scissors and clip’ from that astonishing miscellany. However, the object now was to hunt up the toad, not news. Exchanges in compact piles and loose piles were moved from shelf to table and table to shelf; exchanges half-opened and unopened, exchanges already clipped and thrown under the spacious table; papers filed and papers not filed; books and magazines in vast piles to be reviewed; ink of all colours in bottles of all sizes, some full, some empty; penholders and pencils enough to kindle a fire; paper-knives, scissors, rulers, and clips anywhere but in their natural places; and as for manuscripts, advertisements, and advertising books—from the size of a bath-towel down to the daintiest card—not to mention samples and offerings presented to the influential man in order to win a good word in his paper (here is the office-boy with another armful by the mail just in), and ‘copy’ enough for six months’ use scattered about! All these things were moved, lifted, separated, swept on one side and swept back again, turned over again and again; but no toad rewarded that amiable editor’s search. ‘Toads like damp,’ I suggested, while offering my small aid in picking up a shower of literature which my friend scattered in his haste. ‘The poor thing can scarcely feel comfortable among this wealth of information and so near the stove.’