rat

Now this is what had been happening to Tom Kitten, and it shows how very unwise it is to go up a chimney in a very old house, where a person does not know his way, and where there are enormous rats.

The two rats consulted together for a few minutes and then went away.

Presently the rats came back and set to work to make him into a dumpling.

The rats dropped the rolling-pin, and listened attentively.

But there was a strong smell of rats; and John Joiner spent the rest of the morning sniffing and whining, and wagging his tail, and going round and round with his head in the hole like a gimlet.

And his dear looked at him in all his imperturbable, complacent self-consciousness of kindness, and saw herself the little rural school-teacher who, with Ella Wheeler Wilcox and Lord Byron as her idols, and with the dream of herself writing "Poems of Passion," had come up to Topeka Town to be beaten by the game into marrying the solid, substantial business man beside her, who enjoyed delight in the spectacle of cats and rats walking the tight-rope in amity, and who was blissfully unaware that she was the Robin Redbreast in a cage that put all heaven in a rage.

"The rats are bad enough," said Miss Merle Merryweather.

Naturally, the cats that performed with the rats were too cowed for this.

On occasion they died, or, when they had become too abjectly spiritless to attack even a rat, were set to work on the tight-rope with the doped starved rats that were too near dead to run away from them.

"People," said the rat, "always speak of it with a sneer--as though it were something dis- graceful.

"Yes," said the rat. "I've come to tell you that we are leaving this one.

"We always know," answered the rat. "The tips of our tails get that tingly feeling--like when your foot's asleep.

Then there is the story of the Pied Piper of Hamelin, how first he piped the rats away, and afterward, when the mayor broke faith with him, drew all the children along with him and went into the mountain.

Whenever she caught a particularly big rat, she would bring it up into the room where we were all sitting, lay the corpse down in the midst of us, and wait to be praised.