"A dog, to be of sound service, ought to be of six to thirteen pounds weight; over that they become too unwieldy. I would also recommend, above all others, the London rat-killing terrier: he is as hard as steel, courageous as a lion, and as handsome as a racehorse!--[Uncle James is a Londoner, of course.] Let the farmers in each parish meet and pass resolutions calling upon their representatives in parliament to take the tax off rat-killing dogs. Let them devise plans for procuring some well-bred terriers and ferrets, and spread the young ones about among their men. Let there be a reward offered of so much per head for dead rats, and let there be one person in each parish appointed to pay for the same. Rats are valuable for manure; let there be a pit in each locality, and let this man stick up an announcement every week, in some conspicuous place, as to the number of rats killed, and by whom. Then, what will be the result? Why, a spirit of emulation will rise up among the villagers, and they will be ransacking every hole and corner for rats. _Thus will a tone of cheerful enterprise, activity, and pleasantry come in among them_, 'with a fund of conversation;' and instead of that crawling, dogged monotony which characterizes their general gait and manner, they will meet their employers and go to their labour with joyous steps and smiling countenances." The coming man, so long expected, is it seems the rat-catcher. Here is manure multiplied, agriculture improved, food husbanded, a smiling, enlightened, and conversible peasantry--and all the result of rat-catching. But a difficulty has been overlooked. When the entire population is converted into rat-catchers, rats must shortly, like the dodo, be extinct. For a while we shall become an exporting country, but this resource must fail us at last, and England's glory will expire with its rats. Then once more we shall have a sullen, silent, discontented peasantry; "their fund of conversation" will be exhausted, or at best the villagers will be reduced to talk with a sigh of the golden age, never to be renewed, when the country enjoyed the unspeakable blessing of rat-catching. In short, we fear that Uncle James has been so exclusively devoted to the science of rat-catching, that he has neglected to cultivate the inferior art of reasoning; but, interested as we suspect it to be, we join in his commendation of the virtues of the terrier. The expedition with which a clever dog will put his victims out of their misery is such that a terrier not four pounds in weight has killed four hundred rats within two hours. By this we may estimate the destruction dealt to the race by that nimble animal, "hard as steel, courageous as a lion, and handsome as a race-horse." A custom has sprung up within the last twenty years of watching these dogs worry rats in a pit, and there are private