No other mammalian baby is so much of a baby and yet comes so near to being no baby at all. It is less than an inch long when put into the pouch, and it weighs only four grains! Four grains? Think how small that is. For there are 7000 grains to a pound, which means that it would take 1750 baby ’possums to weigh as much as two cups of sugar! “I should say he was peculiar!” I hear you exclaim; and you will agree with an ancient History of Carolina which I have, when it declares: “The Opoffom is the wonder of all the land animals.” I wish you had been with me one spring day as I was stretching a “lay-out” line across Cubby Hollow. (A lay-out line is a long fish-line, strung with baited hooks, and reaching across the pond from shore to shore.) I was out in the middle of the pond, lying flat on a raft made of three cedar rails, when my dog began to bark at something in a brier-patch on shore. Paddling in as fast as I could, I found the dog standing before a large ’possum, which was backed up against a tree. I finally got Mrs. ’Possum by the tail and dropped her unhurt into my eel-pot--a fish-trap made out of an empty nail-keg--which I had left since fall among the bushes of the hillside. Then paddling again to the middle of the pond, I untangled and set my hooks on the lay-out line, and came back to shore for my ’possum. I didn’t quite fancy pushing my hand down through the burlap cover over the end of the keg; so I turned it upside down to spill the ’possum out,--and out she spilled and nine little ’possums with her! I had put in one and spilled out--ten! And this proves again that the ’possum is peculiar. Nine of these were babies that had been hidden from me and the dog in their mother’s pouch. Peculiar, too, was the history of one of these nine young ’possums (the one we named “Pinky”). For after Pinky’s mother choked to death on a fish-bone, I gave all his brothers and sisters away, and devoted myself to training Pinky up in the way he should go. And strangely enough, when he was grown, unlike any other wild animal I had ever tamed, he would not depart from these domesticated ways, but insisted upon coming back home every time I took him away to the woods. Of course he was only a few months old when I tried to turn him loose in the woods, and that may account for his returning and squeezing through the opening of the pump-box trough into the kitchen and going fast asleep on the cushion of the settee; as it may also account for his getting into a neighbor’s yard by mistake on his way back one night and drowning in the well. You have read of ’possum hunts;--and they are peculiar, too, as naturally they must needs be. For you hunt ’possums with rabbit hounds, and shoot them with a meal-sack--shoot them _into_ a meal-sack would be more exact. And you hunt by moonlight if you really love ’possum.