"Chocolate," replied the admiral. "I rather fancy the Self varieties, there's something so well-bred looking about them; for my part I don't think a mouse can show his figure if he's got a pied pelt on him, it detracts. Now this buck for instance, look at his great size, graceful too, very gracefully built, legs a little coarse perhaps, but an excellent tail, a perfect whipcord, no knots, no kinks, a lovely taper to the point!"
The mouse began to scramble. "Gently, gently!" murmured the admiral, shaking it back into position.
He eyed it with approbation, then dropped it back into its cage, where it scurried up the ladder and vanished into its bedroom. They passed from cage to cage; into some he would only let them peep lest the does with young should get irritable; from others he withdrew the inmates, displaying them on his hand.
"Now this," he told them, catching a grey-blue mouse. "This is worth your looking at carefully. Here we have a champion, Champion Blue Pippin. I won the Colour Cup with this fellow last year. Of course I grant you he's a good colour; very pure and rich, good deep tone too, and even, perfectly even, you notice." He turned the mouse over deftly for a moment so that they might see for themselves that its stomach matched its back. "But so clumsy," he continued. "Did you ever see such a clumsy fellow? Then his ears are too small, though their texture is all right; and I always said he lacked boldness of eye; I never really cared for his eyes, there's something timid about them, not to be compared with Cocoa Nibs, that first buck you saw. But there it is, this fellow won his championship; of course I always say that Cary can't judge a mouse!"
Champion Blue Pippin was replaced in his cage; the admiral shook his finger at him where he sat grooming his whiskers against the bars.
"A good mouse," he told Joan confidentially. "Very tame and affectionate as you see, but a champion, no never! As I told them at the National Mouse Club."
They turned to the shelves on the other side. Here were the Pied and Dutch varieties.
"I don't care for them, as you know," said Admiral Bourne. "Still I keep a few for luck, and they are rather pretty."
He showed them the queer Dutch mice, half white, half coloured. Then the Variegated mice, their pelts white with minute streaks or dots of colour evenly distributed over body and head. There were black and tan mice and a bewildering assortment of the Pied variety which the admiral declared he disliked. Last of all, in a little cubicle by itself, was a larger cage than any of the others, a kind of Mouse Palace. This cage contained a number of neat boxes, each with its ladder, and in addition to the ordinary outer compartment was a big bright wheel. Up and down the ladders ran the common little red-eyed white mice; while they watched them a couple sprang into the wheel and began turning it.
"Oh! The white mice that you buy at the Army and Navy!" said Milly in a disappointed voice.