I myself had once a tame otter, with a detail of whose habits and manners I shall now conclude this article. When I first obtained the animal she was very young, and not more than sixteen inches in length: young as she was, she was very fierce, and would bite viciously if any one put his hand near the nest of straw in which she was kept. As she grew a little older, however, she became more familiarized to the approaches of human beings, and would suffer herself to be gently stroked upon the back or head; when tired of being caressed, she would growl in a peculiar manner, and presently use her sharp teeth if the warning to let her alone were not attended to. In one respect the manners of this animal presented a striking contrast to the accounts I had read and heard of other tame individuals. She evinced no particular affection for me; she grew tame certainly, but her tameness was rather of a general than of an exclusive character: unlike other wild animals which I had at different times succeeded in domesticating, this creature testified no particular gratitude to her master, and whoever fed her, or set her at liberty, was her favourite for the time being. She preferred fish to any other diet, and eagerly devoured all descriptions, whether taken in fresh or salt water, though she certainly preferred the former. She would seize the fish between her fore paws, hold it firmly on the ground, and devour it downwards to the tail, which with the head the dainty animal rejected. When fish could not be procured, she would eat, but sparingly, of bread and milk, as well as the lean of raw meat; fat she could on no account be prevailed upon to touch.
Towards other animals my otter for a long period maintained an appearance of perfect indifference. If a dog approached her suddenly, she would utter a sharp, whistling noise, and betake herself to some place of safety: if pursued, she would turn and show fight. If the dog exhibited no symptoms of hostility, she would presently return to her place at the fireside, where she would lie basking for hours at a time.
When I first obtained this animal, there was no water sufficiently near to where I lived in which I could give her an occasional bath; and being apprehensive, that, if entirely deprived of an element in which nature had designed her to pass so considerable a portion of her existence, she would languish and die, I allowed her a tub as a substitute for her native river; and in this she plunged and swam with much apparent delight. It was in this manner that I became acquainted with the curious fact, that the otter, when passing along beneath the surface of the water, does not usually accomplish its object by swimming, but by walking along the bottom, which it can do as securely and with as much rapidity as it can run on dry land.
After having had my otter about a year, I changed my residence to another quarter of the town, and the stream well known to all who have seen Edinburgh as the “Water of Leith,” flowed past the rear of the house. The creature being by this time so tame as to be allowed perfect liberty, I took it down one evening to the river, and permitted it to disport itself for the first time since its capture in a deep and open stream. The animal was delighted with the new and refreshing enjoyment, and I found that a daily swim in the river greatly conduced to its health and happiness. I would sometimes walk for nearly a mile along the bank, and the happy and frolicsome creature would accompany me by water, and that too so rapidly that I could not even by very smart walking keep pace with it. On some occasions it caught small fish, such as minnows, eels, and occasionally a trout of inconsiderable size. When it was only a minnow or a small eel which it caught, it would devour it in the water, putting its head for that purpose above the surface; when, however, it had made a trout its prey, it would come to shore, and devour it more at leisure. I strove very assiduously to train this otter to fish for me, as I had heard they have sometimes been taught to do; but I never could succeed in this attempt, nor could I even prevail upon the animal to give me up at any time the fish which she had taken: the moment I approached her to do so, as if suspecting my intention, she would at once take to the water, and, crossing to the other side of the stream, devour her prey in security. This difficulty in training I impute to the animal’s want of an individual affection for me, for it was not affection, but her own pleasure, which induced her to follow me down the stream; and she would with equal willingness follow any other person who happened to release her from her box. This absence of affection was probably nothing more than peculiarity of disposition in this individual, there being numerous instances of a contrary nature upon record.
Although this otter failed to exhibit those affectionate traits of character which have displayed themselves in other individuals of her tribe towards the human species, she was by no means of a cold or unsocial disposition towards some of my smaller domestic animals. With an Angora cat she soon after I got her formed a very close friendship, and when in the house was unhappy when not in the company of her friend. I had one day an opportunity of witnessing a singular display of attachment on the part of this otter towards the cat:—A little terrier dog attacked the latter as she lay by the fire, and driving her thence, pursued her under the table, where she stood on her defence, spitting and setting up her back in defiance: at this instant the otter entered the apartment, and no sooner did she perceive what was going on, than she flew with much fury and bitterness upon the dog, seized him by the face with her teeth, and would doubtless have inflicted a severe chastisement upon him, had I not hastened to the rescue, and, separating the combatants, expelled the terrier from the room.
When permitted to wander in the garden, this otter would search for grubs, worms, and snails, which she would eat with much apparent relish, detaching the latter from their shell with surprising quickness and dexterity. She would likewise mount upon the chairs at the window, and catch and eat flies—a practice which I have not as yet seen recorded in the natural history of this animal. I had this otter in my possession nearly two years, and have in the above sketch mentioned only a few of its most striking peculiarities. Did I not fear encroaching on space which is perhaps the property of another contributor, I could have carried its history to a much greater length.
H. D. R.
RANDOM SKETCHES—No. II.
AN AMERICAN NOBLEMAN.
There reached our city, on the morning of the 29th day of July, and sailed from it on the night of the 31st, the most remarkable person perhaps by whom our shores have been lately visited. Were we to second our own feelings, we would apply a higher epithet to William Lloyd Garrison, but we have chosen one in which we are persuaded all parties would agree who partook of his intercourse, however much they may differ from each other and from him in principle and in practice. The object of this short paper is to leave on the pages of our literature some record of an extraordinary individual, who is a literary man himself, being the editor and proprietor of a successful newspaper published at Boston in Massachusetts; but his name may be best recommended to our readers in connection with that of the well-known George Thompson, whose eloquence was so powerful an auxiliary to the unnumbered petitions which at length wrung from our legislature the just but expensive emancipation of the West Indian negroes. Community of action and of suffering, as pleaders for the rights of the black and coloured population of the United States, has rendered them bosom friends, and each has a child called after the name of the other. Thompson is now a denizen of the United Kingdom; but while we write, Garrison is crossing the broad Atlantic to encounter new dangers: comparatively safe at home, his life is forfeited whenever he ventures to pass the moral line of demarcation which separates the free from the slave states—forfeited so surely as there is a rifle in Kentucky or a bowie knife in Alabama.
We have set Garrison down as “an American nobleman,” and the “peerage” in which we look for his titles and dignities is “The Martyr Age of the United States of America,” by Harriet Martineau—a writer to whom none will deny the possession of discrimination, which is all we contend for. “William Lloyd Garrison is one of God’s nobility—the head of the moral aristocracy, whose prerogatives we are contemplating. It is not only that he is invulnerable to injury—that he early got the world under his feet in a way which it would have made Zeno stroke his beard with a complacency to witness; but that in his meekness, his sympathies, his self-forgetfulness, he appears ‘covered all over with the stars and orders’ of the spiritual realm whence he derives his dignities and his powers. At present he is a marked man wherever he turns. The faces of his friends brighten when his step is heard: the people of colour almost kneel to him; and the rest of society jeers, pelts, and execrates him. Amidst all this, his gladsome life rolls on, ‘too busy to be anxious, and too loving to be sad.’ He springs from his bed singing at sunrise: and if during the day tears should cloud his serenity, they are never shed for himself. His countenance of steady compassion gives hope to the oppressed, who look to him as the Jews looked to Moses. It was this serene countenance, saint-like in its earnestness and purity, that a man bought at a print-shop, where it was exposed without a name, and hung up as the most apostolic face he ever saw. It does not alter the case that the man took it out of the frame, and hid it when he found that it was Garrison who had been adorning his parlour.” And he can be no common man of whom it is recorded in the work to which we have already alluded, that, on starting a newspaper for the advocacy of abolition principles, “Garrison and his friend Knapp, a printer, were ere long living in a garret, on bread and water, expending all their spare earnings and time on the publication, and that when it sold particularly well (says Knapp), we treated ourselves with a bowl of milk.”—The Martyr Age of the United States of America, p. 5.