I do not mention this habit of hers in praise of the
species, but merely to show how almost human some of them are. If the
transmigration of souls is a fact, this animal was certainly qualifying
most rapidly for a Christian, for her vanity was only second to her love
of drink. Whenever she caught a particularly big rat, she would bring it
up into the room where we were all sitting, lay the corpse down in the
midst of us, and wait to be praised. Lord! how the girls used to scream.

Poor rats! They seem only to exist so that cats and dogs may gain credit
for killing them and chemists make a fortune by inventing specialties
in poison for their destruction. And yet there is something fascinating
about them. There is a weirdness and uncanniness attaching to them. They
are so cunning and strong, so terrible in their numbers, so cruel, so
secret. They swarm in deserted houses, where the broken casements hang
rotting to the crumbling walls and the doors swing creaking on their
rusty hinges. They know the sinking ship and leave her, no one knows how
or whither. They whisper to each other in their hiding-places how a
doom will fall upon the hall and the great name die forgotten. They do
fearful deeds in ghastly charnel-houses.

No tale of horror is complete without the rats. In stories of ghosts
and murderers they scamper through the echoing rooms, and the gnawing of
their teeth is heard behind the wainscot, and their gleaming eyes peer
through the holes in the worm-eaten tapestry, and they scream in shrill,
unearthly notes in the dead of night, while the moaning wind sweeps,
sobbing, round the ruined turret towers, and passes wailing like a woman
through the chambers bare and tenantless.

And dying prisoners, in their loathsome dungeons, see through the
horrid gloom their small red eyes, like glittering coals, hear in
the death-like silence the rush of their claw-like feet, and start up
shrieking in the darkness and watch through the awful night.

I love to read tales about rats. They make my flesh creep so. I like
that tale of Bishop Hatto and the rats. The wicked bishop, you know, had
ever so much corn stored in his granaries and would not let the starving
people touch it, but when they prayed to him for food gathered them
together in his barn, and then shutting the doors on them, set fire
to the place and burned them all to death. But next day there came
thousands upon thousands of rats, sent to do judgment on him. Then
B