A tree fell in the distance, with no tearing shriek of perturbation, but with a resounding crash, which told me that its death had come to it, perhaps months before, and that only now were its neighbours letting it slip from their supporting arms to the earth, where unnumbered seedlings would, in a few weeks, spring to life over and around it. Another silence—during which I lay and watched the moon climb up over the tree-tops, the way the ibis had come—and then a harsh, guttural complaint broke on my ears from just above my head. “Ug-g-g-, ug-ug, ug—?” It was an opossum just awaking from his cosy sleep. I could almost see him shake himself and snap his little sharp white teeth. “Ug-ug, ug,” he seemed to say. “What a nuisance! Another day’s work all to start over again! tut, tut!” Then a little pouched mouse hopped airily out into the moonlight right under my very nose; sat upright, stroked his whiskers thoughtfully, and started off, on what cannibal orgy I almost trembled to think, remembering Mr. Hall’s story of how fifty of these bloodthirsty beings were sent to the University—were sent, I say, for but two arrived—with a little heap of skin and fur to tell the tale; while, in the very bottle in which they were put to be chloroformed, the survivors indulged in a mortal combat. There are other tiny pouched mice in parts of the State which jump like kangaroos, but that night I was not in range of them; and this one cannibal creature was the only one of his kind that I saw. By the time the mouse had passed, literally brushing by me in search of a more sizeable prey, the owls had started, and the doleful cry of “More pork, more-pork!” echoed from tree to tree. More opossums began to stir, leaping and scolding among the boughs, while all the undergrowth seemed alive with the oddest rustlings and little whimpering cries. Of a truth night in the forest holds an infinitude of wonder and delight, but little enough of sleep, unless you are so inured to it as to cease to start and wonder at every sound. Once there were Titanic marsupials as large as a rhinoceros, and phalanges monstrous as any polar bear, and giant kangaroos a dozen feet high, and a wombat as great as an ox, in these very woods, away back in what I believe is called the Eocene Age—and what must the stir and turmoil of such a night have been in those days, when all these small people make such a bustle now from dark to dawn!