You will doubtless wonder how our rats and cats, creatures so totally unsympathetic,—one in fact being the natural prey of the other,—managed to live together. In the most amicable way imaginable. The cats never showed their claws to the rats; the rats never exhibited the least fear or distrust of the cats. This conduct on the part of the cats was thoroughly sincere, and never once were the rats called upon to mourn the death of a comrade. Don Pierrot de Navarre showed the tenderest affection for these tiny neighbors. He would lie down by the cage for hours together, watching them at play. If by accident the door of the room was shut, he would scratch and softly mew to have it opened, that he might rejoin his little white friends, who not infrequently would come from their cage and go to sleep by his side. Seraphita, of a loftier nature than he, and not so fond of the musky odor of rats, never took part in these games; but she did the rats no harm, and suffered them to pass before her without once extending a claw. The end of these rats was strange enough. One sultry day in summer when the thermometer marked the ordinary heat of Senegal, their cage was placed in the garden, under the shade of a vine-covered arbor; for they seemed to suffer from the heat. A heavy storm came up, with great gusts of wind, lightning and rain. The tall poplars on the river’s bank bent like reeds. Armed with an umbrella, we were on the point of going out to look for our pets, when a vivid lightning flash, which seemed to split the very depths of the heavens, stopped us on the first step of the flight which led from the terrace to the garden. A tremendous thunder-clap followed, louder than the discharge of a hundred cannon. The shock was so violent that we were almost thrown down by it. After this explosion the storm grew a little calmer; and hastening to the arbor we found the thirty-two rats lying with their paws in the air, all killed by the same thunderbolt. The wire of their cage had without doubt attracted the lightning. Thus perished together, as they had lived together, thirty-two Norway rats,—an enviable death, and one not often granted by implacable fate! [Illustration: THE BLACK DYNASTY.] CHAPTER III. THE BLACK DYNASTY.