Besides the creatures that breed in the building, I keep a good many animals, which furnish my people with employment and amusement. I am heartily glad to have something for them to do, as otherwise they would get terribly homesick. For what better resource is left us in our isolation than seeking to forget our cares in the society of animals? There is not much amusement to be had, I warrant you, in a great stone prison-house like ours. The chief favourites are the monkeys, on account of their strange tricks, which are very amusing. You may generally see round their cage a group of admiring bystanders, who watch their mischievous pranks with the keenest interest. I have also wolves, bears, broad-horned stags—which are frequently but incorrectly called fallow deer—and common deer, likewise gazelles, lynxes, ichneumons, and of the weasel kind the varieties called martens and sables; also, if you care to know, a pig as well, whose companionship I am told by my grooms is wholesome for horses. I certainly ought to have given him a place in my catalogue, as he attracts numbers of Asiatics to my lodging. They come to see this unclean animal, which the laws of their religion forbid their tasting. The beast is all the more interesting to them, because pigs are never kept, or even seen, in their country. Indeed, a Turk would as lief touch one of them as I would touch a man with the plague. I will tell you a capital story of a friend of mine, who took advantage of this prejudice. He wished to send me a private parcel, so he got a little pig, and put it with the parcel in a sack, which he then told his servant to take to me. When he came to the door my cavasse met him, and asked him what he had got in the sack. The servant whispered in his ear, ‘It is a little pig, a present from a friend.’ The cavasse gave the sack a poke with his stick, on which the little pig began to squeak. The moment he heard it he made a hasty retreat, crying out, ‘Well, take your nasty dirty present in, if you must, and be hanged to you.’ Then, with a look of intense disgust, he turned to his fellow Mussulmans, and said, ‘How extraordinarily fond the Christians are of the flesh of that filthiest of animals; they positively cannot live without it.’ Thus the servant was admitted, and brought in the secret parcel. I have also many kinds of birds, such as eagles, ravens, jackdaws, foreign kinds of ducks, Balearic cranes, and partridges. From this you will see that my house is full of animals, ‘A Noah’s ark, in short,’ as one of my friends observed.