Wheresoever man goes, Rat follows, or accompanies him. Town or country are equally agreeable to him. He enters upon your house as a tenant at will, (his own, not yours,) works out for himself a covered way in your walls, ascends by it from one story to another, and leaving you the larger apartments, takes possession of the space between floor and ceiling, as an entresol for himself. There he has his parties, and his revels and his gallopades, (merry ones they are) when you would be asleep, if it were not for the spirit with which the youth and belles of Rat-land keep up the ball over your head. And you are more fortunate than most of your neighbours, if he does not prepare for himself a mausoleum behind your chimney-piece or under your hearth-stone,[1] retire into it when he is about to die, and very soon afford you full proof that though he may have lived like a hermit, his relics are not in the odour of sanctity. You have then the additional comfort of knowing that the spot so appropriated will thenceforth be used either as a common cemetery, or a family vault. In this respect, as in many others, nearer approaches are made to us by inferior creatures than are dreamt of in our philosophy. [Footnote 1: Southey alludes here to an incident which occurred in his own house. On taking up the hearth-stone in the dining-room at Keswick, it was found that the mice had made underneath it a Campo Santo,—a depository for their dead.] The adventurous merchant ships a cargo for some distant port, Rat goes with it. Great Britain plants a colony in Botany Bay, Van Diemen's Land, or at the Swan River, Rat takes the opportunity for colonizing also. Ships are sent out upon a voyage of discovery. Rat embarks as a volunteer. He doubled the Stormy Cape with Diaz, arrived at Malabar in the first European vessel with Gama, discovered the new world with Columbus and took possession of it at the same time, and circumnavigated the globe with Magellan and with Drake and with Cook. After all, the Seigneur de Humesesne, whatever were the merits of that great case which he pleaded before Pantagruel at Paris, had reasonable grounds for his assertion when he said, _Monsieur et Messieurs, si l'iniquité des hommes estoit aussi facilement vuë en jugement categorique, comme on connoit mousches en lait, le monde quatre bœufs ne seroit tant mangé de Rats comme il est._