Rensselaer Union, Volume 9, Number 29, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 5 April 1877 — Peculiarities of Some Animals. [ARTICLE]

Peculiarities of Some Animals.

Cats are affectionate; they love young chickens, sweet cream and the best place in front of the fireplace. Dogs are faithful; they will stick to a bone after everybody else has deserted it. The donkey is an emblem of patience, Sit if you study him closer, you will find at laziness is what’s the matter with khn. The eagle is the monarch of the skies, but the little king-bird will chase him to his hiding-place. Monkeys are imitative, but if they can’t imitate some deviltry they are not happy. Hens know when it is going to rain'

and shelter themselves, but they will try to hatch out a glass egg just as honestly as they will one of their own. Hornets have more fight in them than anything of their size, but tnere is no method in their madness; they will pitch into a meeting-house when they are l furlous just as anxiously as they wtti into * sleeping baby in its cradle. Flies toil not, neither do they spin, .yet they have the first taste of all the best gravies in the land. The cuckoo is the greatest economist among the birds; she lays her eggs in other birds’ nests, and lets them' hatch them out at their leisure. Rats have fewer friends and more enemies than anything of the four-legged persuasion on the face of the earth, and yet rats are as plenty now as in the palmiest days of the Roman Empire. The serpent and the crab change their clothing each year, snd the raccoon lives all winter long on the memory of what he ate in the summer. The horse gets up from the ground on his forelegs first, and the cow on her hind ones, ana the dog turns around three times before he lies down. The elephant has the least, and the rabbit the most, eye for his size, and a rat’s tail is Just the length of his body. The roof of the thoroughbred dog’s mouth is always black. So is the bottom of the cat’s foot who is a good mouser. The spider is the only creature that catches its food in a trap, andasheep will live without water longer than any domestic animal. Thofox is the hardest to catch in a trap, and a musk-rat the easiest, and the mead-ow-lark, is the shyest of all the birds of the air. The crow flies six miles, and the wild pigeon sixty, an hour, but the hummingbird beats all things on the wjng. The horse will eat ten hours but of every twelve; the ox lies down and chews his cud half the time; and the hog never knows what it is not to be hungry. The wild turkey can run faster than he can fly, and. any man who is a good walker can tire a deer out in twenty-four hours. —Jonh Billings, inN. Y. Weekly.