THE PASSING OF THE BLACK RAT (NOTE.--The old English black rat, for some three hundred years predominant in this country, is now well-nigh extinct. He has been superseded, some think exterminated, by the brown Hanoverian rat, a more powerful and disreputable species, which made its appearance in the course of the eighteenth century.) The black rat sat back on his haunches, pricked up his ears, and listened. It was something different to the faint lapping wash of the sewer; different to the dull hum of the traffic. It was an uncanny, unfamiliar scratching. Every rat knows the scratching of his relations; but the black rat had no relations. Six weeks ago there had been at least two others of his kind in existence--the one he had fought with, and the one he had most unsuccessfully fought for. As a matter of fact, he had crawled away from that encounter to die. Instead of dying, he had recovered. That his rival was in reality the better rat he could not allow. Position is everything in the rat _duello_, and position had not favoured him. After a series of disastrous frontal attacks, he had limped behind the old corn-bin, with half his mouth torn away, and his front paws mangled and useless. He had bowed his head and waited sullenly for the _coup de grace_. But the _coup de grace_ never came. There had been a diversion in the rear, and into the cause of that diversion he had not troubled to inquire. He had seen neither him nor her since, and, until he had recovered from his wounds, had hardly felt his loneliness. For a wounded rat, loneliness is normal and necessary. Of late, as he sniffed dubiously round the old familiar corners, the sense of desolation had forced itself upon him. He recalled, dimly, the few weeks before his misfortune. Every day the number of the tribe had lessened. First went the patriarch, white about the muzzle, grizzled all over, tottering and feeble, but still of eminent distinction--the black rat does not coarsen with age--then, one by one, with fearless inconsequence, the younger ones; lastly, save two, his own contemporaries. * * * * * The scratching seemed to get louder. The black rat glided, like a shadow, towards it. It sounded from the bottom of the door. [Illustration: FIRST THE PATRIARCH, WHITE ABOUT THE MUZZLE, GRIZZLED ALL OVER, BUT STILL OF EMINENT DISTINCTION.] Three sides of the cellar--for a hundred years the cellar had been the rats' stronghold--were solid masonry. The fourth side was a wooden partition. At one corner of this stood the door, close-fitted to its sill and frame, and shrouded in cobwebs, which, in rats' memory, had never parted. Along the wall opposite ran a six-inch shelf, and, at the extremity of this shelf, where the fittings entered the brickwork, was the entrance of the run.