Although those who hawk Tortoises about the streets will often tell purchasers to put them into their kitchens that they may eat Beetles and Cockroaches, I believe it to be well understood that they are intrinsically vegetable feeders; a position well put by Frank Buckland, who says that Tortoises put into a kitchen to eat Beetles will in due time die of starvation, and then most probably the Beetles will eat them. Certainly ours never eat anything but vegetable food. But a Tortoise in a neighbouring garden does every morning consume a very substantial quantity of bread and milk, or rather bread well-soaked in milk, and he appears to thrive well upon it. Our Tortoises never drink water, and are decidedly not tempted to drink by milk being offered to them. Whatever the season, the Tortoises retire very early to bed. The warmth and sunniness of the day appear to regulate the exact time, but they rarely remain up after three or four o’clock, and in the cooler seasons, or on dull days, they retire much earlier. They will go day after day to the same warm and leafy nook; and they have a habit on rising in the morning of simply turning out of bed, and lying for a time just outside of their bed-place, with their heads stupidly stretched out, or staring vacantly up into the air, before entering upon the serious business of the day. {33} I should say their _Memory_ is very strong. I have said they remember persons. They remember places they know, and if carried away will march straight off and back again to the place they wish to go to; and what is more remarkable, when brought out in the spring after seven or eight months’ hybernation, they do exactly as they did the day before they went to sleep; and will march off as direct to the old spots as if they had only had one day’s interregnum. As a further instance of memory or intelligent knowledge, we are constantly in the habit, in the cooler weather, of putting them to bed under a mat in the greenhouse; and we very constantly find them, in the morning, waiting by the greenhouse door to be let out, clearly remembering that this is the place by which they will have to pass into the open air. They do not appear to care much for each other’s society—(I believe they are both males)—but they do not fight. Neither are they respecters of each other’s persons, for they walk over each other’s backs in the most indifferent way, if either happens to be in the direct road of the other’s progression.