In the old days here, when drinking-water mostly came from wells, the population must have swallowed masses of unwholesome stuff. There is a well (now closed) in Lustleigh town-place just where the ground slopes downward from the churchyard to the Wrey. Here at Wreyland there is a well in front of the Hall House, now used for horses drinking at a trough, but formerly for all mankind. There were two pig-sties five yards from it and a third within ten yards; and it was on the lowest ground here, so that things would easily drain in. This house is higher up, but the well was on the lower side of it; and my grandfather had the present well sunk in 1839. His well received great praise, as I am told. “Th’apothecary man come here and saith as he must anderize the well. And I saith, ‘Well, if you must, you must.’ And then he come again and saith, ‘I’ve anderized that well, and if you drink of that, you’ll live for ever.’” That was the substance of what he said, but not (I believe) the form in which he said it. People here are apt to put things in the form they would have used themselves. A lady of great dignity once noticed a donkey here, and remarked what a fine animal it was; and she was perturbed at hearing that the villagers were saying she had praised the animal in detail, ending up “and if there be one part of’n as I admire more than another, it be his rump.” From time to time the County Council appoints a ‘rat-week’ for a general attack on rats. Rats have a good deal of sense: they abandon places where they are hunted down, and congregate in places where they are left alone. A rat-week frightens them away from these infested places; and in the following week there are more rats than can be managed in the places that were nearly free of them before. So a rat-week is rather a nuisance to anybody who has always kept rats down. When there is an attack on any kind of creature, there is always an outcry that every kind of creature has its use, and we shall suffer for upsetting Nature’s plans; and one naturally gets impatient with the silly folk who have all cobwebs swept away, and then go grumbling that their rooms are full of flies. But rats are not indigenous here--England did very well without them until about 1350, like Australia without rabbits until about 1850. I am quite sure rats must be killed, and I get traps and poisons; but when it comes to killing one, my sympathies are with the rat, and I always have a secret hope that it will get away.