Opening one of the cupboards with a key fastened to his pocket by a chain, he took out a small double leather case; one side contained a photograph of an old lady in a black gown and a white puffed widow’s cap; from the opposite opening, he drew a thick card, yellow from its rest in the dark, and handed it to father. Printed on it in heavy letters were these words: “Successor to the original Harry Leverings—Rat-catcher. At the old stand—2100 West 42d St.—Contracts made for clearing hotels and public buildings.—No poisons used, traps and strictly reliable men only employed.” Across the bottom in silhouette were a string of steel traps and a bevy of scurrying rats. Taking the card from father, whose face certainly expressed all the interest necessary to encourage the narrator, Scott placed it on the mantel-shelf as a sort of prompter, and straightway plunged into the story:— “There were only two boys of us who lived to grow up at home, John and me. Of course, when my father died, John, being the elder, had the land holdings, a goodish bit of a farm that had given a fair living when well managed, while I had very little, but leave to get out. My mother loved me best, I knew, but John was the heir, and that was the beginning and the end of it. To keep me by her, she would have been willing to see me knuckle down to be little more than a field hand to my brother, but I would not. I had no trade except if knowing a good horse and how to ride him could be called one, but I could shoot straight, and through friendship with a game-keeper, I knew the ways of every beastie of the woods and fallows of a great estate on the edge of which our land lay. Many a night I’ve lain out in the fern with him, and miles did I tramp after him when he went about setting and tending his traps for things that killed the game. Poor McTaggert, I remember him well; he only died last year. “What I meant to do more than get away, I never knew when I took my fortune, less than a hundred pounds, and left for America, for John was hard and had an underhand way of working between me and my mother that made every day I stayed a battle. Then, too, he made trouble with my boyish sweetheart, Annie Fenton, a neighbour’s daughter, that in my eyes always acted as if she feared and disliked him, yet dared not tell him so. For a couple of months I drifted about here and there, but never locating. One night when I had been thinking that my money would likely run low before I had made my start, I was stopping at a cheap commercial hotel in New York, when I heard them talking of the rats that overran the kitchen, and about one Harry Leverings, who, with a gang of men under him, made a handsome living at rat-catching. This man, moreover, was coming there that night.