Quantico is an island, a quaint, delightful place, with a club-house. We started immediately after dark, going across to the mainland, accompanied by a dozen hounds, with three or four negroes to manage them and serve as axemen. Each member of the party carried a torch, as without one it was impossible to go at any speed through the woods. The dogs, of course, have to be specially trained not to follow either fox or rabbit. It was dawn before we got back, wet, muddy, and weary, carrying eleven possums. All night long we rambled through the woods and across the fields, the dogs working about us as we followed in single file. After a while some dog would strike a trail. It might take some time to puzzle it out; then the whole pack would be away, and all the men ran helter-skelter after them, plunging over logs and through swamps, and now and then taking headers in the darkness. We were never fortunate enough to strike a coon, which would have given a good run and a fight at the end of it. When the unfortunate possum was overtaken on the ground he was killed before we got up. Otherwise he was popped alive into one of the big bags carried by the axemen. Two or three times he got into a hollow log or hole and we dug or chopped him out. Generally, however, he went up a tree. It was a picturesque sight, in the flickering glare of the torches, to see the dogs leaping up around the trunk of a tree and finally to make out the possum clinging to the trunk or perched on some slender branch, his eyes shining brightly through the darkness; or to watch the muscular grace with which the darky axemen, ragged and sinewy, chopped into any tree if it had too large and smooth a trunk to climb. A possum is a queer, sluggish creature, whose brain seems to work more like that of some reptile than like a mammal’s. When one is found in a tree there is no difficulty whatever in picking it off with the naked hand. Two or three times during the night I climbed the tree myself, either going from branch to branch or swarming up some tangle of grape-vines. The possum opened his mouth as I approached and looked as menacing as he knew how; but if I pulled him by the tail he forgot everything except trying to grab with all four feet, and then I could take him by the back of the neck and lift him off—either carrying him down, held gingerly at arm’s length, or dropping him into the open mouth of a bag if I felt sufficiently sure of my aim.