n-up people when asleep, but I cannot vouch
for the truth of this beyond what once happened to myself. I was then
inhabiting a house which swarmed with these creatures, and one night
I awoke with a sharp pain in my right arm. Jumping up, I disturbed
a rat, who sprang off the bed, and was chased and killed by me. I
found he had given me a nip just below the elbow. I once had a most
amusing rat-hunt in the house I now occupy. I had then just taken
it over on the part of the Government, in 1868. The whole building
is floored with polished marble, which, being new, was like
looking-glass. I found an enormous rat, which I took for a bandicoot,
in one of the bath-rooms, and, shutting him in for a while, I closed
the doors of a very large room adjoining, which was quite empty, and
then turned my friend in with a small black-and-tan terrier. The
scrimmage that ensued was most laughable, as both rat and dog kept
slipping and sliding all over the place. At last the former was pinned
in a corner, where he made a most determined stand, and left several
marks before he died. They seldom now come so high as the third story,
but we had two or three last year which dug a hole through a brick
wall into my study, and they were surreptitiously disposed of unknown
to my eldest little girl, whose passionate love for every living
creature made her take even the rats under her protection, and one
of them would come out every morning in the verandah to be fed by
her with crumbs and grain. This one was spared for a while, but I
was not sorry to find one day that it had fallen into a tub of water
in a bath-room and was drowned.

The brown rat breeds several times in the year, and has from ten to
fourteen at a time, and it is to be hoped that there is considerable
mortality amongst the infants. I have never kept rats as pets, but
have noticed amongst mice a tendency on the part of the mother to
devour her offspring. I have no doubt that this also is the case with
the brown rat, and aids in keeping down its numbers. It is stated
that they will attack, kill, and eat each other. The Rev. J. G. Wood
remarks in his Natural History: "From some strange cause the male
rats far outnumber the females, the proportion being about eight of
the former to three or four of the latter. This disproportion of the
sexes may possibly be caused by the cannibalistic habits of the rat,
the flesh of the female being more tender than that of the opposite
sex. Whatever ma