The mammals in Australia are divided into two groups, to one of which—the egg-laying mammals, or prototheria—only two specimens belong, all the rest coming under the other section, the theria. The platypus and the spiny ant-eater, which comprise the first group, are—to the superficial eye—as different as any two animals can well be, the anteater not being unlike a slender light-coloured English hedgehog in appearance, and covered with similar prickles, while the platypus is covered with the softest and closest of brown fur. I have a little toque made of platypus—in defiance of all law, for, rightly enough, the weird little animal is most strictly protected—which has often been taken for a very close, fine sealskin. The platypus has a wide bill, like a duck, and webbed front feet; but its hind-feet have claws on them, rather like an otter, while it lays eggs and suckles its young, and does everything else by means of which it is possible to puzzle the zoologist. It is an intensely shy creature, and, living in the burrow by the river’s edge, as it does, is as much at home in the water as on land, and very difficult indeed to catch a glimpse of. Once I numbered among my friends a very likeable vagabond, who for years earned a sufficiency of food by selling the eels he caught in a bend of the River Yarra, about three miles above Melbourne. He had no roof over his head, excepting the trees, or perhaps an empty cattle-shed in the wettest weather, and he possessed neither wife nor children nor domestic impedimenta of any sort, nor any wardrobe—except what he carried on his back—while he was so frankly idle—apart from his occasional and leisurely occupation of letting down eel-lines—that at the last census he wittily suggested he should be described as a gentleman. This man told me—and I believed him, for he had nothing to gain by lying—that he had seen a platypus in that very bend of the river; but, though I crept out evening after evening and watched untiringly in the same place, I never met with the same luck; perhaps because I had not, like him, such fine “estates in time,” as Charles Lamb would put it.