The plague had its beginning in what was considered a necessary improvement for the health of the village as well as its morals, the demolition of an old tavern that for a century had stood at the crossways opposite the railway station at the side of the road where, a few hundred rods higher up, was Martin Cortright’s cottage. The tavern, a relic of stage-coach days, and flanked by great barns and pastures of many acres that reached uphill quite to the Cortrights’ boundaries, had gradually fallen, until it became a road-house of the worst type, with its barns crumbling, filthy with the litter of years, and the land used for the rooting-ground of a breed of black swill-fed pigs. Its malodour had so offended the nose of public spirit as embodied in the Anglican Catholic, the Severely Protestant, Mrs. Jenks-Smith, Martin Cortright, and father, as health officer, that a public subscription had been secured, the place bought, the buildings, including the pig-pens, razed, and the land ploughed up to sweeten, preparatory to turning the plot into a sort of park to be a playground for the school children. All this had taken place in the early spring, and by fall every trace and odour of the nuisance that had existed was gone; but the Committee, when they had paid off all scores, had not reckoned with the rats that for generations had been housed upon the premises. During the summer, these rats evidently turned tramps, and, using the wide-chinked stone fences for runways, by which they travelled from farm to farm, lived in luxury, unobserved, though everywhere came complaint of the loss of young chickens and eggs, this being laid to cats, hawks, and weasels. But no sooner did Black Frost show himself than the winter homing instinct that comes upon man, as well as the lesser animals, seized the rats, and from all sides they began to travel back to their old haunts; these lacking, they sought the nearest shelter. The Cortrights were away in early autumn, and late the first night after their return, Lavinia, candle in hand, going down the front stairs of her well-ordered and supposedly mouse-proof house, encountered a gray-whiskered rat coming up with so fixed a purpose, that even her shrieks and Martin’s coming only drove him to the hall below where, according to the testimony of Martin and Lavinia, he backed into a corner and put up a successful fight against Martin, armed with an umbrella, the wall paper receiving the whole of the damage. The maid, intrenched in the hall above, whispered a different version of the encounter, which was that the Master, being short-sighted, and lacking his glasses, had charged at the corner where the rat was not, much to the rat’s advantage.