"Leopold," the white rat, came to live with us at 322-B Baker Street in San Francisco towards the middle of October, 1968.

Like the majority of us, he was a young male, past adolescence but not yet fully grown, single, and with no outstandingly bad habits (except of course for peeing everywhere he went, and pooping wherever it suited him--but it was a large apartment [This was before Gentrification], which we were fairly assiduous in sweeping out every two or three days, and we didn't worry too much about it).  As all of us had done, basically, when we came to live there, he just showed up one day, out of nowhere, and stood on his hind legs in the doorway between the hall and the kitchen, politely waiting to be acknowledged, and then joined us, going from one to the other of us and sitting on our knees and climbing up on our shoulders.  Like us, San Francisco being what it was then, he had a knack for making everybody in the room feel welcome.  So we petted him, and bumped noses with him, and let him climb on us, and put down little saucers on the kitchen floor of whatever we could think of that a rat might like to eat or drink, and begged him at least to consider pooping in the garbage.  And we called him Leopold, simply to have something to call him.

Everyone smoked cigarets in those days.  Those who didn't, like Dennis, our senior housemate at 322-B, suffered horribly from the ubiquitous suffocating miasma of cigaret smoke, and often said so, but were ignored.  I also smoked of course, but, in a partially successful effort to cut down, and to add to my repertory of genteel 18th century affectations and mannerisms, I began in the late 1960's to sniff snuff.  I quickly found out, however, that having the occasional piss-elegant pinch of snuff, like getting fucked in the ass, is something which, if you are not utterly to disgrace yourself, you must diligently and scrupulously, and with much forethought, prepare for:  (1) In the first place, how do you get the snuff, in just the right amount, at just the right force of aspiration, and with a minimum of ado, into your nostril?  Instinctually, with my habitual child-of-Virgo Pudeur and refinement, I shrank from the pretentious display and pother of shaking out a certain amount of tobacco from the slot in the outer circumference of a small tin wheel (the form in which it was packaged by the Dean Swift Snuff Company) onto the web between my first finger and thumb, and thence conveying the snuff to my nostrils with a flamboyant gesture that covered half my face.  "No," I said, "let it be an honest, precise pinch of snuff, measured by eye and hand from an open container, and delivered with a discreet gesture to the nostril(s) between the thumb and forefinger."  Adieu, therefore, to fussy round tin cookies, and Salut! to winsome colored plastic boxes, with lids sufficiently tight to carry loose and ready-to-hand in my outer pockets without spilling their contents. I soon was carrying two practical, modern, very pretty snuff boxes in my coat pockets:  a diminutive emerald green plastic box, about 1 1/4" square for mentholated "Dr. Johnson," and an amber plastic box of the same size and dimensions for Dean Swift's exquisite, sandalwood-scented "Inchkenneth."  (2) In the second place, you must deal with the fact that the nose is really not a good place to stick things: the pleasant, peppery, perfumed powder, once aspirated, and having done its momentary soothing and prickling, quickening and clarifying of one's thoughts, must and will be expelled--as dark brown snot; lizard shit to all appearances.  You must, in short, have something to blow your nose on.  And here again the Modern Age, with Disposable Paper Tissues, proves itself infinitely superior to ages past; I never went out without two mini-packs of Kleenexes in my pockets.  I was so taken, moreover, with the beauty and convenience of my little plastic snuff boxes that I bought bigger ones in the same colors--several times as big--to store the snuff I bought in bulk, and kept them on the mantle of the fireplace in the living room.  And, of course, I invited any who might wish to to help themselves to a pinch whenever they wanted.  For this was the height of the Hippie Renaissance in the Haight-Ashbury and we shared everything, even things that no one else wanted.

Surprisingly, it took me more than a week after he came to live with us to think to offer Leopold a pinch of snuff. As I'd expected he would be, he was indifferent to the sharp menthol of Dr. Johnson, but when I took the lid off the box of Inchkenneth and extended it to him, he grabbed it and laid his little head right in it, and stood on his hind legs and did a little dance, and wandered off sideways. So--what the hey--I left the box open for him when I went to bed.  The next morning my small personal box of Inchkenneth was empty where I'd left it--and the big storage box of Inchkenneth which had been on the mantle was lying on the hearth, sprung open and half empty, with many, many little rat footprints in it and around it...and Leopold was gone, and we never saw him again.