re it was dark.

While she sat and froze--in both senses--however, the black rat, rigid
as a beast cut out of coal, with one bright, shining eye upon the
harrier beating up and down, was probing the dusk with the other eye.
And presently he thought he saw his chance. He would have had to move,
anyway, I fancy, for the strain of sitting there bang in the open was
unendurable. His nerves would have snapped. So he went to his
chance--a hole in the bank of the ditch.

I say he went, but I only take it to be so because he got there. One
could not actually see him go. One had only an idea, quite an
uncertain idea, that something, most like a swift bird, had passed up
the ditch, and one could not swear even to that. It seemed impossible
that the flying something had been a four-legged animal.

It was the black rat. Nor did he go straight. He went, if I may so
put it, every way at once, ending up with a merry-go-round dance with
death--the harrier was pouncing savagely--round a tuft of grass, at
such a speed that he looked exactly like the rim of a quickly spun
bicycle-wheel--a halo, that is to say, and nothing else.

And then--he was crouched, panting, inside the hole, wondering whether
his heart or his lungs would be the first to burst. And then? Oh, and
then he--cleaned himself, naturally and of course. What else did you
expect? He was the original black rat of Old England, and one of the
cleanest animals on earth.

Mrs. Ratus, having vanished past finding while the hunt to the hole was
on, presently scented her lord out, when the night had come and the
harrier was gone, and together, starting like antelope at every hint of
a sound, they traveled up the ditch, and up the bank of a stream that
the ditch folded into.

Once an owl--the nomad, short-eared owl of the marshes--let forth a
hoot that would have sent a nervous lady into "astericks," and sent
_them_ into no-where, as if it had detonated a charge of that lively
mystery called T.N.T. under their dainty feet. Once, just as they were
lapping like dogs at the edge of the ice that was conspiring to span
the brook, an otter shot up his head--jaws wide and dripping--almost
under their long and pointed noses, and they, with one accord, and
driven by their long tails acting as a spring, leapt simply into space.
At any rate, they could not be followed by mortal eye, wherever they
did leap to.

And once they met a wandering cat. And that cat seemed to go mad