The animal had already made one or two rounds of his plate, and was eating with praiseworthy deliberation. He would bite off a mouthful of toad-stool, chew it carefully until he had extracted all the juice, then open his mouth and drop out the chewed 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, eating his plate like Æneas and the other Trojans,[75] and as the fungus decreased in regular circles, the circle of chewed fragments increased. In three-quarters of an hour he had eaten all the disk of the fungus to the stem part, and then he walked slowly off to look for another. I found the crumbs that had fallen from his vanished table quite dry, nothing nutritious being left in them. Why he rejected the central part of the fungus and the stem, I could not imagine, but he left it in every instance. If he came upon a decayed or wormy portion of the toad-stool, he did not “bite round it,” but abandoned it altogether, and went for a fresh one. At another turn in this wood, I found, under a pine tree, the shell and entire skeleton of a turtle, from which every particle of flesh and muscle was gone. The animal had died on his bed of pine needles, and his decaying body had been devoured by ants, which had left a delicately white skeleton. The little horny jaw had a very close resemblance to the beaks of certain birds. The turtle is a four-legged reptile, with a short, stout, oval-shaped body, encased in a bony frame or box, from which the animal is able to protrude its head, legs, and tail, and into which it can withdraw them at pleasure. In different varieties of turtle, the size and shape of the box-like covering varies. The box tortoise can retire into its shell and close the under part into a groove of the upper edge, and thus form for itself an impregnable retreat; but there are varieties only partly encased by the shell, which cannot bring their heads and feet under cover. The turtle wanders about with its house on its back as the snail does, and against its enemies it can close its doors and be emphatically “not at home.” Turtles have keen sight and hearing; they have no teeth, the jaws being simply cased in horn, like those of birds. Many of them are capable of making loud sounds. Turtles lay eggs which are buried in earth or sand, and left to themselves to hatch. The sea turtle is the largest variety, and will sometimes lay as many as two hundred eggs in a single heap. Sea turtles weighing a thousand pounds have been caught in tropical lands. Turtles of five or six hundred pounds weight have been captured on the United States coast.