"There, Dolly, now you listen to how the rats run about on Mrs. Picture when she was on board of the ship." Thus Aunt M'riar, always with that haunting vice of perverting Art, Literature, Morals, and Philosophy to the oppressive improvement of the young. She seldom scored a success, and this time she was hoisted with her own petard. For Dolly jumped with delight at the prospect of a romance of fascinating character, combining Zoology and Travel. She applied for a place to hear it, on the knee of Mrs. Burr, who, however, would have had to sit down to supply it. So she was forced to be content with a bald version of the tale, as Mrs. Burr had to see to getting their suppers upstairs. She was rather disappointed at the size and number of the rats. She enquired:--"Was they large rats, or small?" and would have preferred to hear that they were about the size of small cats--not larger, for fear of inconveniencing old Mrs. Picture. And a circumstance throwing doubt on their number was unwelcome to her. For it appeared that old Mrs. Picture slept with her fellow-passengers in a dark cabin, and no one might light a match all night for fear of the Captain. And rats ran over those passengers' faces! But it may have been all the same rat, and to Dolly that seemed much less satisfactory than troops. She was rather cast down about it, but there was no need to discourage Dave. She could invent some extra rats, when he came back from school. * * * * * Lay down the book, you who read, and give but a moment's thought to the strangeness of these two episodes, over half a century apart. One, in the black darkness of an emigrant's sleeping-quarters on a ship outward-bound, all its tenants huddled close in the stifling air; child and woman, weak and strong, sick and healthy even, penned in alike to sleep their best on ranks of shelves, a mere packed storage of human goods, to be delivered after long months of battle with the seas, ten thousand miles from home. Or, if you shrink from the thought that Maisie's luck on her first voyage was so cruel as that, conceive her interview with those rodent fellow-passengers as having taken place in the best quarters money could buy on such a ship--and what would _they_ be, against a good steerage-berth nowadays?--and give her, at least, a couch to herself. Picture her, if you will, at liberty to start from it in terror and scramble up a companion ladder to an open deck, and pick her way through shrouds and a bare headway of restless sprits above, and Heaven knows what of coiled cordage and inexplicable bulkhead underfoot, to some haven where a merciful old mariner, alone upon his watch, shuts his eyes to his duty and tolerates the beautiful girl on deck, when he is told by her that she cannot sleep for the rats. Make the weather fair, to keep the picture at its best, and let her pass the hours till the coming of the dawn, watching the mainmast-truck sway to and fro