The impudence of the Indian house-crow is great, that of the sparrow is colossal, that of the striped squirrel staggering, but the impudence of all these is surpassed by that of the mungoose. Small wonder, then, that it makes an excellent pet. McMaster kept one that died of grief when separated from him. But, in order to tame a mungoose, the animal must be captured while young. Babu R. P. Sanyal, in his useful _Handbook on the Management of Animals in Captivity_, writes: “Adult specimens seldom become tame enough even for exhibition in a menagerie; they either remain hidden away in the straw or snap at the wire, uttering a querulous yelp, possibly expressive of disgust, at the approach of man. They have been known to refuse nourishment and to starve to death.”
A mungoose (_Herpestes ichneumon_) allied to our Indian species is common in Egypt, where it is known as Pharaoh’s rat or Pharoe’s mouse. It is frequently trained by the inhabitants to protect them from rats and snakes.
The mungoose is a ratter without peer. Bennet, in his _Tower Menagerie_, states that “the individual now in the Tower actually, on one occasion, killed no fewer than a dozen full-grown rats, which were loosed to it in a room 16 feet square, in less than a minute and a half.” The Egyptian species eats crocodiles’ eggs, so that Diodorus Siculus remarks that but for the ichneumon there would have been no sailing on the Nile. The Indian species seems to display no penchant towards crocodiles’ eggs.
“With that I saw two swannes of goodly hewe Come softly swimming downe the lee; Two fairer birds I yet did never see; The snow, which does the top of Pindus strew, Did never whiter shew.”
When I speak of “the swan,” I mean the bird called by ornithologists the mute swan (_Cygnus olor_), the swan of the poets that warbles sublime and enchanting music when it is about to shuffle off its mortal coil, the tame swan of Europe, the swan that used to take Siegfried for cheap trips down the river, the swan that “graces the brook,” the swan of the “stately homes of England,” the swan I used to feed as a youngster on the Serpentine, not the black fellow in St. James’s Park, the swan that hovers expectantly in the offing while you are having tea in a boat on the Thames. This is, of course, by no means the only species of swan. There are plenty of others—white ones, black ones, black-and-white ones—for the family enjoys a wide distribution. Nevertheless, I propose to confine myself to this particular swan. I have excellent reasons for doing so. As it is the only swan with which I have had much to do, I can, like the Cambridge Don who declared that the Kaiser was quite the pleasantest Emperor he had ever met, say that _Cygnus olor_ is the most agreeable of my swan acquaintances. This may sound like flattery, like the fulsome praise of the penny-a-line puffer. It is nothing of the kind. It is barely complimentary. Among the blind the one-eyed is king, unless, of course, he lives in a republic. “You are the best of a very bad lot,” were the encouraging words with which a prize for arithmetic was once handed to me. The mute swan is the most agreeable of a bad-tempered clan.