[Illustration: COMMON BOX TORTOISE. Breakfasting on a Toadstool.] Very amusing it was to watch him, as with praiseworthy deliberation he ate round after round of the cap of the fungus. He would bite off a mouthful of the toadstool, chew it carefully until he had extracted the whole of the juice, then open his mouth and drop out the masticated fibre, and take a fresh mouthful, not biting inward toward the stem, but breaking off the morsel next beside that which he had just eaten. He paced round and round the fungus as he took his bites, and as the fungus decreased in regular circles, the chewed fragments increased. In less than an hour he had eaten all the disk of the fungus to the stipe, and then walked slowly away to seek for another. The discarded parts of the fungus appeared quite dry when examined, nothing nutritious being left in them. There must have been some very good reason for rejecting the central part and the stem, which were left in every instance, but what that reason was we could not imagine. If a decayed or wormy portion of a toadstool was encountered in the feeding process, he did not bite round it, but abandoned the plant altogether, and went off in quest of a fresh specimen. Coming, in his travels, to a steep gully or ravine which he desires to cross, he does not attempt the undertaking without counting his chances of success. He seemingly revolves the matter over and over for some time in his mind, and, when at last he has reached a conclusion, draws his head and feet under cover, and by some quick, sudden jerk flings himself down to the bottom, trusting to good fortune and his own wits to making his way over the further incline. Observation teaches that his deliberations are generally attended with the accomplishment of the result to be attained. There is a very common turtle, quite abundant in the small lakes and streams of our Western States, where he is trapped in great numbers for the market, which country people dub the Snapping Turtle, or which, from the resemblance which the head and neck, when stretched out, bear to the same parts of the alligator, takes the name of Alligator Turtle, or _Chelydra serpentina_, with the more learned naturalist. He has a shell too small to close over him and hide him completely, but nature, to make up for this deficiency of covering, has given him a bold and hasty temper, which leads him to snap vigorously when disturbed. Snapping Turtles live rather harmoniously together, even when confined in the same pen, and only manifest their ugly dispositions towards each other when excited by causes from without, with whose origin they have nothing to do. Contests of a very vicious character are often thus precipitated, which sooner or later end in the death of one or more of the belligerent parties.