Pennant relates a story of a burglarious grand-larceny troop of rats, which nearly frightened a young lady out of her wits, by mistaking her chimney for one leading to a cheese-room. She was suddenly wakened by a tremendous clatter in her bed-chamber, and on looking up saw a terrific troop of rats running about in wild disorder. She had presence of mind enough to throw her candlestick at them (_timor arma ministral_) and to her great joy she found that they speedily departed by the way which they had entered her apartment, leaving only a cloud of soot over the room. Forty years ago, the house of a surgeon in Swansea was greatly infested with rats, and he completely got rid of them by burning off all the hair from one of them which he had caught alive, and then allowing it to return to its hole. It was said that he never afterward saw a rat on his premises, except the burnt sufferer, which on the following day returned, and was caught in the same trap from which he had been but just set at liberty. I suppose that in their "Advertiser," the description of a ghost, and a notice of haunted premises was given, which caused the whole colony so unanimously to decamp. A DARK CHAPTER FROM THE DIARY OF A LAW CLERK. One Ephraim Bridgman, who died in 1783, had for many years farmed a large quantity of land in the neighborhood of Lavenham or Lanham (the name is spelt both ways), a small market-town about twelve miles south of Bury St. Edmunds. He was also land agent as well as tenant to a noble lord possessing much property thereabouts, and appears to have been a very fast man for those times, as, although he kept up appearances to the last, his only child and heir, Mark Bridgman, found on looking closely into his deceased father's affairs, that were every body paid, he himself would be left little better than a pauper. Still, if the noble landlord could be induced to give a _very_ long day for the heavy balance due to him--not only for arrears of rent, but moneys received on his lordship's account--Mark, who was a prudent energetic young man, nothing doubted of pulling through without much difficulty--the farm being low rented and the agency lucrative. This desirable object, however, proved exceedingly difficult of attainment, and after a protracted and fruitless negotiation, by letter, with Messrs. Winstanley, of Lincoln's-Inn-Fields, London, his lordship's solicitors, the young farmer determined, as a last resource, on a journey to town, in the vague hope that on a personal interview he should find those gentlemen not quite such square, hard, rigid persons as their written communications indicated them to be. Delusive hope! They were precisely as stiff, formal, accurate, and unvarying as their letters. "The exact balance due to his lordship," said Winstanley, senior, "is, as previously stated, £2103 14s. 6d., which sum, secured by warrant of attorney, _must_ be paid as follows: one half in eight, and the remaining moiety in sixteen months from