e partially snow-covered straw.

Then he got a shock that turned him into a winking series of black
streaks.

Then he got another shock which turned him, literally, into--well, into
black lightning. You never saw anything like it in all your life. You
never would have believed that any living beast could have so
frantically and so furiously got itself about from place to place so
instantaneously. It was--dazzling. It made you blink. It was It in
the agility line, and no mistake.

Firstly, the brown rat, having hidden up in some black corner, with
brown-rat cunning, came hopping out instantly--nay, charging--on the
black rat's trail. And there was murder in his wicked, little,
glinting eyes at he came.

Secondly, a white eider-down quilt--at least, that was what it seemed
like--descended lightly as--as an eider quilt, and as soundlessly, out
of the blue-black sky, and covered the brown rat up. You could hear
his horrid, muffled screaming of rage and fear under the quilt; you
could see the quilt--but they saw that it looked pale brown on
top--lifting about, and feeling for that murder-child of a rat
underneath. Then the quilt got him--you could hear the unspeakably
beastly death-squeal reverberate mufflingly--and then the quilt rose,
still utterly without sound, and one saw it was a big barn-owl, with a
rat--a brown rat--twitching in its white-mittened claws.

But do you think that made any difference? If so, you don't know the
cruel devil of perseverance that is the brown rat.

As the black rat, at the end of his amazing lightning display, reached
the barn, with his mate behind him, he leapt--he could not stop--clean
over the back of one great twenty-inch, glitter-eyed brown ghoul,
called by the death-scream of his colleague--other rats usually answer
it--coming out of a hole. The black rats dashed into the hole like
flickering streaks, but the brown rat had instantly spun upon himself,
and was after them.

The barn was an unfortunate choice. It seemed full of brown rats, and
four of them, in the darkness, instantly took up the pursuit of the now
fairly hunted black couple. Nothing but their miraculous agility saved
those two from being eaten alive, but they came out of the barn on to
the spotless snow on the far side, with only a foot to spare between
their long tails and the mangy, scarred head of the leading brown fiend
behind them.

Straight across the open, like a drawn black bar, they shot, to