The alligator’s bill of fare is not confined to the living creatures we have just mentioned as furnishing its favorite food. Alert for its breakfast, this pirate of the lagoons and bayous gathers up fish, flesh, and fowl for its table, but swallows, as a condiment, whatever comes handy. An old rubber shoe floating in the water, an empty soda-water bottle, a lost jack-knife, a battered tin can, a stone as big as an orange, part of a broken lamp,--any of these are welcomed as serving to fill the yawning vacancy in its stomach, and to aid in grinding up more digestible food. Similarly an ostrich will swallow a horseshoe, a table-knife, a spoon, a leather strap and buckle, a few spools of thread, or any other trifle left in its way, seeming to consider its stomach, as a school-boy does his pocket, a general receptacle for almost anything that comes to hand! Baby alligators make rather amusing pets for a number of months, before they begin to exhibit hereditary traits, when they at once fail to be agreeable. They will eat eggs, raw or cooked meat, rats, mice, birds, frogs, toads. They learn to come when they are called, enjoy hearing a whistle, and, on rare occasions, show some slight degree of gratitude and affection, amiable characteristics which they speedily outgrow. When these baby alligators are a few months old, they must be killed or put back into the water where their relatives live. Alligators are usually silent animals, but in the spring, when the eggs are being laid, they all become noisy and excited, and bellow like buffaloes. A number of adult alligators roaring together make a sound like distant heavy thunder. The mother alligator builds with her front feet a mound of mud, or sand, though if she finds a mound just to her taste, she takes that, and saves herself trouble. In the mound she places her eggs, and in due time the sun hatches them. The eggs of reptiles are not enclosed in hard, brittle shells, as those of birds, but in a thick, tough, elastic skin, as if the white skin that lines a bird’s egg-shell had grown parchment-like and served instead of shell. The eggs are the size of hen’s eggs, but more pointed. As soon as the little alligators come from the egg, they scuttle off to the water and are ready to fight their enemies and begin their predatory lives. As they are smaller and less fierce than the gavials, caymans, or true crocodiles, they are far less destructive. An alligator of twelve feet long is a giant of his kind. Not only are the alligators smaller than crocodiles, but they have fewer teeth, and are “less handy with their tails,” not being able to strike out quite so vigorously.