Is it a wonder that the life fires burn low? that sometimes the small flames flicker and go out?
CHAPTER IX
THE PECULIAR ’POSSUM
If you are a New Englander, or a Northwesterner, then, probably, you have never pulled a ’possum out of his hollow stump or from under some old rail-pile, as I have done, many a time, down in southern New Jersey. And so, probably, you have never made the acquaintance of the most peculiar creature in our American woods.
Even roast ’possum is peculiar. Up to the time you taste roast ’possum you quite agree with Charles Lamb that roast pig is peculiarly the most delicious delicacy “in the whole modus edibilis,” in other words, bill of fare. But once you eat roast ’possum, you will go all over Lamb’s tasty “Dissertation upon Roast Pig,” marking out “pig” with your pencil and writing in “’possum,” making the essay read thus:—
“There is no flavor comparable, I will contend, to that of the crisp, tawny, well-watched, not over-roasted, ’possum, as it is called,—the very teeth are invited to their share of the pleasure at this banquet in overcoming the coy, brittle resistance,—with the adhesive oleaginous—O call it not fat! but an indefinable sweetness growing up to it—the tender blossoming of fat—fat cropped in the bud—taken in the shoot—in the first innocence—” For no matter how old your roast ’possum, he is as tender as the tenderest roast pig. And that, of course, is peculiar.
But live ’possum is more peculiar than roast ’possum. It is peculiar, for instance, that almost all of the ’possum’s relations, except his immediate family, dwell apart in Australia,—in Australasia, for marsupials are found also in Tasmania, New Guinea, and the Moluccas—which islands the marsupials seem to have had given them for their own when the world was made. There, at least, most of them live and have lived for ages, except the ’possums. These latter, strangely enough, live in South and North America, and nowhere else. The peculiar, puzzling thing about them is: how they, and they only of the marsupials, got away from Australia across the sea to America. Did a family of them get set adrift on a log and float across? Or was there once, as geologists tell us, a long string of islands close together, stretching from the tip of South America, from the “Horn,” off across the sea to Australia, over which the ’possums might once have made their way? But if they came by such a route, why did not the kangaroos come too? Ah, the kangaroo is not a ’possum. There is no other creature in the woods that would dare play “Follow the leader” with the ’possum. No, I am half inclined to think the scientists right who say that the ’possum is the great-great-grandfather of all the marsupials, and that the migration might have been the other way about—from America, across the sea.
But what is the use of speculating? Here is the ’possum in our woods; that we know; and yonder in Australasia are his thirteen sets of cousins, and there they seem always to have been, for of these thirteen sets of cousins, four sets have so long since ceased to live that they are now among the fossils, slowly turning, every one of them, to stone!