“The inhabitants number some fourteen hundred, and are as good‐humoured and unsophisticated a set of people as you will meet with anywhere. The fisheries and the coast trade form their principal means of subsistence. The women take a very fair share of the hard work out of the men’s hands. You constantly see them carrying coals from the vessels to the quay in curious hand‐barrows; they laugh, scream, and run in each other’s way incessantly; but these little irregularities seem to assist rather than impede them in the prosecution of their tasks. As to the men, one absorbing interest appears to govern them all. The whole day long they are mending boats, painting boats, cleaning boats, rowing boats, or, standing with their hands in their pockets, looking at boats. The children seem to be children in size, and children in nothing else. They congregate together in sober little groups, and hold mysterious conversation, in a dialect which we cannot understand. If they ever tumble down, soil their pinafores, throw stones, or make mud‐pies, they practise these juvenile vices in a midnight secresy that no stranger’s eye can penetrate.” A mile or so out at sea rises a green triangularly‐shaped eminence, called Looe Island. Several years since a ship was wrecked on the island, but not only were the crew saved, but several free passengers of the rat species, who had got on board, nobody knew how, where, or when, were also preserved by their own strenuous exertions, and wisely took up permanent quarters for the future on the _terra firma_ of Looe Island. In course of time these rats increased and multiplied; and, being confined all round within certain limits by the sea, soon became a palpable and tremendous nuisance. Destruction was threatened to the agricultural produce of all the small patches of cultivated land on the island—it seemed doubtful whether any man who ventured there by himself might not share the fate of Bishop Hatto, and be devoured by rats. Under these circumstances, the people of Looe decided to make one determined and united effort to extirpate the whole colony of invaders. Ordinary means of destruction had been tried already, and without effect. It was said that the rats left for dead on the ground had mysteriously revived faster than they could be picked up and skinned or cast into the sea. Rats desperately wounded had got away into their holes, and become convalescent, and increased and multiplied again more productively than ever. The great problem was, not how to kill the rats, but how to annihilate them so effectually that the whole population might certainly know that the reappearance of even one of them was altogether out of the question. This was the problem, and it was solved practically and triumphantly in the following manner:—All the inhabitants of the town were called to join in a great hunt. The rats were caught by every conceivable artifice; and, once taken, were instantly and