was held during such hot weather, that some of the radicals wanted to start out immediately and settle on the North Pole. They were promptly overruled, of course, and the 750,000 rats, including males and females, wandered on slowly in their chosen direction, increasing on the road to a wonderful extent. The council concluded to hold a thorough count or census of rats, and each male rat, it was provided, should not be bashful about coming forward and giving the true number of his whole family--no doctoring of the returns allowed. After the count was completed, all the rats over and above the original amount, 750,000, agreed to stay in the country they had arrived at. The originals kept on moving towards the north-west, but the others filled up every section of the earth they passed through. The rats made friends with neither man nor animal on their journey. First they made a stop in a state where all the owls--although they were countrymen of the rats, having emigrated from China--fell upon them, and there was a pitched battle, the rats afterwards hiding themselves in their holes under ground after losing a great many in dead and wounded. One day they agreed to make an excursion out of the line of their route and so take in Egypt. In a few weeks they here ate up all the corn from the fields, stealing and hiding away anything edible, and quite creating a panic, but always fighting shy of the daylight. We read in the histories of a great locust plague in Egypt, about this time, but on this point we have a revelation to make. The locust was just as innocent of this crime as it is of building the Brooklyn Bridge--_it was the rats that did it_. When the rats arrived in Greece they scored a signal victory, because it was there that they extirminated a whole nation--the mice--and the former have strongly held this country ever since. We are authentically informed, by reference to our own private rat historian's notes of this trip, that the first place the rats met their great enemy, the Dog, was in Ancient Rome, where the dogs were put on them by man with much success, and here the rats could get no firm foothold. This caused them a roundabout journey north, and when they thought they had pretty well established themselves in ancient Gaul, now France, they were raided by a strange tigerish kind of animal which proved afterwards a lasting antagonist of theirs--the Cat. The poor rodents found here the other enemies they had encountered on the road, the owl and the dog, who were always urged on fiercely by man. While the rats were struggling along in France, the land was convulsed by an earthquake, causing the Atlantic river's banks to be overflowed. This submerged the land on which the rats were, and as they all could swim they headed their course for England, the nearest dry land. It was here the ferrets joined man, dogs, cats and owls, but the more the rats were hunted, the more acute and crafty they got to be, until they found