the young lady in the fable, who turned to a cat the moment a mouse appeared, they forgot their parts, their audience, and their manager, at the sight of the viands which were introduced in the course of the piece; and, dropping on all-fours, fell to with the native voracity of their race. The performance was concluded by their hanging in triumph their enemy the cat, and dancing round her body. The rat, as we have said, has many enemies: the weazel, the pole-cat, the otter, the dog, the cat, and the snake hunt him remorselessly all over the world. Man, however, is his most relentless and destructive enemy. In some places he is killed for food, as in China, where dried split rats are sold as a dainty. The _chiffonniers_ of Paris feed on them without reluctance. Nor is rat-pie altogether obsolete in our own country. The gipsies continue to eat such as are caught in stacks and barns, and a distinguished surgeon of our time frequently had them served up at his table. They feed chiefly upon grain; and it is merely the repulsive idea which attaches to this animal under every form that causes it to be rejected by the same man who esteems the lobster, the crab, and the shrimp a delicacy, although he knows that they are the scavengers of the sea. They were not always so nice in the navy. An old captain in her Majesty's service informs us that on one occasion, when returning from India, the vessel was infested with rats, which made great ravages among the biscuit. Jack, to compensate for his lost provisions, had all the spoilers he could kill, put into pies, and considered them an extraordinary delicacy. At the siege of Malta, when the French were hard pressed, rats fetched a dollar apiece; but the famished garrison marked their sense of the excellence of those which were delicately fed by offering a double price for every one caught in a granary. Man directs his hostility against the rat, however, chiefly because he considers him a nuisance; and the gin and poison, cold iron and the bowl, a dismal alternative, are accordingly presented to him. With the former he is not so easily caught, and will never enter a trap or touch a gin in which any of his kind have fretted and rubbed. Poison is a more effectual method, but it is not always safe. Rats which have been beguiled into partaking of arsenic instantly make for the water to quench their intolerable thirst, and, though they usually withdraw from the house, they may resort in their agony to an in-door cistern, and remain there to pollute it.[13] The writer who calls himself "Uncle James," and who, for a reason that will shortly appear, is exceedingly anxious to impress the public with the belief that the best mode of getting rid of the rat is to hunt him with terriers, states that a dairy-farmer in Limerick poisoned his calves and pigs by giving them the skim milk at which rats had drunk when under the pangs produced by arsenic. One mode of