Nothing seems too odd or disagreeable to be regarded with affection. Lord Erskine, who always expressed a great interest in animals, had at one time two leeches for favourites. Taken dangerously ill at Portsmouth, he fancied that they had saved his life. Every day he gave them fresh water and formed a friendship with them. He said he was sure that both knew him, and were grateful for his attentions. He named them Home and Cline, for two celebrated surgeons, and he affirmed that their dispositions were quite different; in fact, he thought he distinguished individuality in these black squirmers from the mire. Even pigs have had the good fortune to interest persons of genius. Robert Herrick had a pet pig which he fed daily with milk from a silver tankard, and Miss Martineau had the same odd fancy. She, too, had a pet pig which she had washed and scrubbed daily. When too ill to superintend the operation she would listen at her window for piggie’s squeal, advertising that the operation had commenced. John Wilson, better known as Christopher North, loved many pets, and was as unique in his methods with them as in all other things. His intense fondness for animals and birds was often a trial to the rest of the family, as when his daughter found he had made a nest for some young gamecocks in her trunk of party dresses which was stored in the attic. On his library table, where “fishing rods found company with Ben Jonson and Jeremy Taylor reposed near a box of barley-sugar,” a tame sparrow he had befriended hopped blithely about, master of the situation. This tiny pet imagined itself the most important occupant of the room. It would nestle in his waistcoat, hop upon his shoulder, and seemed influenced by constant association with a giant, for it grew in stature until it was alleged that the sparrow was gradually becoming an eagle.