But this was not what set my heart beating again almost as thickly as a moment previously. It was a peculiar, musty, unpleasant odour, which made me instinctively spring up against the side of the hole and struggle hard to climb back to daylight. But rough as the walls of my prison were, my claws could get no grip, and I fell back panting and helpless to the bottom. Again and again I tried. The brickwork was very old, covered with close green moss and riddled with holes, and more than once I succeeded in climbing a good distance up the sides. But I always came at last to some place where I could find no foothold, and went sliding helplessly down to the bottom again. Soon I was quite exhausted. I had eaten hardly anything since Jack left, and the escape from the cat and the shock of my long fall had taken it out of me badly. At last I was forced to give it up and lay at full length breathing hard upon the sodden leaves. Presently came a soft rustling sound, then a slight squeak. By this time my eyes were well accustomed to the gloom, and looking upwards, there at the mouth of one of the holes a sharp black nose appeared and a pair of beady, black eyes which stared at me fixedly. A moment later another nose showed from another hole, then a third, and a fourth. More and more came out, until the whole of the slimy old wall seemed alive with them, and all with their keen unwinking eyes fixed upon me as I crouched helpless in the bottom of the old dry well. [Illustration: THE WHOLE OF THE SLIMY OLD WALL SEEMED ALIVE WITH THEM.] In the woods we squirrels seldom trouble about rats. In some of the old banks and hedgerows there are hundreds of them, but they don’t interfere with us as they do with the earth-livers and with the birds that nest on the ground. They cannot harm us tree-dwellers. But we do not trust them, any more than do the rest of the woodland folk. Cruel, cunning and treacherous, the grey Hanoverian rat is the most detested and despised of all the animals, and the vile odour of his unclean body at once drives away all other creatures from his neighbourhood. For myself, I have and always had a perfect horror of rats. Mother once told us a ghastly story of how one of our people, accidentally caught in a steel trap, was literally eaten alive by rats. And here I was, in an almost equally helpless case, at the mercy of a score of the carrion brutes.