THE FELIDÆ AND LAVENDER.

Temuka Leader, Issue 1566, 17 March 1887, Page 1

THE FELIDÆ AND LAVENDER.

A short cut to the heart of any of the large felid&a is to be found in lavender water, a fact which 1 discovered by accident. The late Mrs Lee, whose leopard “ Sai” was an interesting inmate of her household, trained tbe animal almost wholly by taking advantage of its love for this perfume. So wanting to be on good terms with the leopard “ Old Man,” I took some lavender water with me. Before giving it to the leopard I thought that I would try the effect on “ Bessy,’ a fine tigress, who has for some time been very gracious in her conduct toward me. I poured a few drops of the perfume on a small piece of brown paper and held it to her. She first gave a prolonged sniff and then scraped the paper out of my hand and laid on the floor of the cage. First she sniffed at it repeatedly, raising her nose high in the air after every sniff. Then she tore it into little pieces, which she strewed over the floor. Then she rolled over and over on the perfumed fragments, giving a series of muffled yelps of delight, and then began leaping all over the cage, springing up until her head struck against the roof, turning over in the air, and coming down on tbe boarded floor with a mighty thump, as might bo expected from an animal weighing more than three hundred pounds. Next, I tried the effect on the leopard “ Old Man,” who occupied the next cage and found that he was even more powerfully affected than the tigress, slobbering over the perfume until the floor of ' tbe cage was quite wet, and rolling over and over exactly as his neighbor had done. Meantime “Empress” who occupied a cage on the opposite site of the budding, bad scented the lavender water from a 1 distance, and was loudly expressing her opinion that she had been shamefully neglected. So I gave her a liberal dose of the perfume, and she, being only a young thing and unaccustomed to selfcontrol straightway proceeded to go mad over it.—Little Snow Flakes.