Our sea life was rather a same one, after the first excitement of starting was over. Neddy spent some hours every day in the cabin, poring over things which I found were called books. I could not at first comprehend why, when his eyes were fixed on the pages which to me seemed exactly alike, he should sometimes look grave, sometimes merry, and sometimes laugh outright, as though some one were talking with him out of the book. When, however, his father read aloud to the boy, or he read aloud to his father, I could imagine why they were amused, though I never could find out by what means the book could make itself heard. I have often snuffed round the volumes, and even touched them with my whiskers, but they seemed to me dead as clay. It must be some wonderful talent, possessed only by man, which enables him to hear any voice from them. There was one large volume in particular, which Captain Blake called "Shakespeare," from which he sometimes read extracts to his son. I heard him say once that this very Shakespeare had been dead for more than two hundred years. Is it not marvellous that his thoughts, preserved in leaves of paper in some manner inexplicable to a rat, should survive himself so long,-- that he should make others both laugh and weep when he himself laughs and weeps no more? As may be supposed, I took no great interest in the reading until my ear was caught one evening by an allusion to my own race in Shakespeare, "Rats, and mice, and such small deer." We had then a place in the wondrous volume; this made me all attention, and more than once that attention was rewarded by hearing of the race of Mus. One mention both surprised and puzzled me. The rhyme still rests on my memory: "But in a sieve I'll thither sail, And like a rat without a tail, I'll do-- I'll do-- I'll do!" The _do_, of course, represents _nibble, nibble, nibble_; but the rat without a tail is of some species of which I had never before heard, and have certainly never met with. When Neddy read to his father, it was from a different book; he called it "History of the French Revolution." It might have been a history of my race, for it seemed to be all about rats: democ-rats and aristoc-rats; "doubtless," thought I, "tribes peculiar to France." Most savage fellows the first seemed to have been-- to our race what tigers are to cats, still more powerful, bloody, and destructive. I, like others who jump at conclusions, and do not understand half of what they hear, had made a ridiculous mistake. My vanity had led me to over-estimate the importance of my family; but a conversation between Neddy and his father undeceived me, and made me a sadder and a wiser rat. _Neddy._-- "Well, papa, I fancy that we shall have a great deal to see at St. Petersburg-- palaces, churches, gardens, all sorts of sights! But what I most want to see is the czar himself, the great autoc-rat of all the Russias."