In the spring of 1903, while in western Kansas, a little girl gave me a baby badger, captured by her brother, and named after him, Josiah. I took Josiah home to Sagamore Hill, where the children received him literally with open arms, while even the dogs finally came to tolerate him. He grew apace, and was a quaint and on the whole a friendly—though occasionally short-tempered—pet. He played tag with us with inexhaustible energy, looking much like a small mattress with a leg at each corner; he dug holes with marvellous rapidity; and when he grew snappish we lifted him up by the back of the neck, which rendered him harmless. He ate bread and milk, dead mice and birds, and eggs; he would take a hen’s egg in his mouth, break it, and avoid spilling any of the contents. When angered, he hissed, and at other times he made low guttural sounds. The nine-year-old boy became his especial friend. Now and then he nipped the little boy’s legs, but this never seemed to interrupt the amicable relations between the two; as the little boy normally wore neither shoes nor stockings, and his blue overalls were thin, Josiah probably found the temptation at times irresistible. If on such occasions the boy was in Josiah’s wire-fenced enclosure, he sat on a box with his legs tucked under him; if the play was taking place outside, he usually climbed into the hammock, while Josiah pranced and capered clumsily beneath, tail up and head thrown back. But Josiah never bit when picked up; although he hissed like a teakettle as the little boy carried him about, usually tightly clasped round where his waist would have been if he had had one. At different times I have been given a fairly appalling number of animals, from known and unknown friends; in one year the list included—besides a lion, a hyena, and a zebra from the Emperor of Ethiopia—five bears, a wildcat, a coyote, two macaws, an eagle, a barn owl, and several snakes and lizards. Most of these went to the Zoo, but a few were kept by the children. Those thus kept numbered at one end of the scale gentle, trustful, pretty things, like kangaroo rats and flying squirrels; and at the other end a queer-tempered young black bear, which the children named Jonathan Edwards, partly because of certain well-marked Calvinistic tendencies in his disposition, partly out of compliment to their mother, whose ancestors included that Puritan divine. The kangaroo rats and flying squirrels slept in their pockets and blouses, went to school with them, and sometimes unexpectedly appeared at breakfast or dinner. The bear added zest to life in more ways than one. When we took him to walk, it was always with a chain and club; and when at last he went to the Zoo, the entire household breathed a sigh of relief, although I think the dogs missed him, as he had occasionally yielded them the pleasure of the chase in its strongest form. [Illustration: JOSIAH ]