You may wonder at this, but it was really the case. During all my life I have had a sort of instinctive antipathy to rats--I might even say a _dread_ of them. This feeling was stronger while I was only a boy; but, although I have since encountered animals of a much more dangerous character, and fought with some, I do not remember any that ever inspired me with more fear than I have felt in coming in contact with that common and ubiquitous creature--the _rat_. It is a fear blended with a feeling of disgust; and it is a fear not altogether unfounded-- for I know of many well-authenticated cases, in which rats have attacked human beings, and not a few where children, and even men, wounded or otherwise disabled, have actually been killed and devoured by these hideous _omnivora_. Many such stories had been told me while I was a boy; and it was but natural I should remember them at that moment. I _did_ remember them; and under the influence of such memories, I felt a fear upon me very much akin to terror. The rat, too, was one of the largest I had ever encountered, so large that for a moment I could scarce believe it to be a rat. It _felt_ as bulky as a half-grown cat. As soon as I became a little composed, I tied up my thumb with a rag torn from my shirt. The wound in a few minutes' time had grown exceedingly painful--for the tooth of a rat is almost as poisonous as the bite of a scorpion--and small as was the scratch, I anticipated a good deal of suffering from it. I need not add that the incident had banished sleep, at least for a time. In reality I did not go to sleep again till nearly morning; and then I awoke every minute or two with a start--from fearful dreams, in which the vision was either a rat or a crab making to seize me by the throat! For hours before I slept at all, I lay listening to see if the brute would return; but I did not note any signs of his presence for the remainder of that night. Perhaps the _squeeze_ I had given him--for I had come down rather heavily upon him--had frightened him enough to hinder a repetition of his visit. With this hope I consoled myself, else it might have been still longer before I should have slept. Of course, the presence of the rat at once accounted for the disappearance of my half biscuit, as well as for the damaged upper leather of my buskin, which latter had been lying at the door of his milder cousin the mouse. The rat, then, must have been prowling around me all the while, without my having known of it.