The lizards in our own country are no less friendly and beautiful, but it seems to me our people are less in harmony with nature than some others, and cherish more unjust traditions; for certainly among us the lizards are received in less hearty good-fellowship, and are very wrongly feared and esteemed harmful. But some people know how to treat my dear lizards with courtesy. A young friend in Florida has made pets of sundry emerald-green lizards. No creatures are more capable of maintaining an absolute stillness if they are suited with their circumstances. Like most of the cold-blooded reptiles, they delight in warmth. My young friend often placed a little green lizard in the knot of lace at the throat of her evening dress, where, delighted with the softness and warmth of the lace and its owner’s neck, it would lie motionless for an entire evening. It was often mistaken for a piece of jeweller’s work in rich green enamel, upon the beauty of which her friends sometimes commented. One of these little lizards would remain for hours, twined bracelet-wise about my young friend’s wrist. Inoffensive in disposition and unprovided with weapons of attack as lizards are, I have often admired nature’s protective methods in their behalf. Walking once in a wood in New Jersey, I was surprised to observe a fragment of the bark of a tree some two feet from me, run round the tree and appear on the farther side. Here was a little lizard of the exact color and markings of the bark of the tree which it frequented; it was only by its motion that it could be discovered when it clung against the trunk or branches. When at rest its little, bright, jet-black eyes were the only noticeable part of it. In that same wood I was equally startled by seeing a dead leaf run away from a heap of leaves as I approached, and a little twig in my path darted out of danger just as I was about to put my foot upon it. These also were lizards, with their slender bodies dressed in gray and brown, with little markings of black and white, a coat closely simulating the colors of dry and decaying vegetation. While capable of lying for hours in entire quiet, still as if fashioned out of gems or metal, the lizard, when it moves, is remarkable for the swiftness of its motions: it darts with the rapidity of an arrow; it seems to have no hesitancy, no afterthought, no change of mind; its spring is with the precision of entire certainty. Perhaps its sure-footedness has something to do with this; on wall or wood, tree, stone, grass, who ever saw a lizard slip or lose its footing?