fate of Bishop Hatto, and be devoured by
rats. Under these pressing circumstances, the people of Looe determined
to make one united and vehement effort to extirpate the whole colony of
invaders. Ordinary means of destruction had been tried already, and
without effect. It was said that rats left for dead on the ground had
mysteriously revived faster than they could be picked up and skinned, or
flung into the sea. Rats desperately wounded had got away into their
holes, and become convalescent, and increased and multiplied again more
productively than ever. The great problem was, not how to kill the rats,
but how to annihilate them so effectually as to place the re-appearance
even of one of them altogether out of the question. This was the
problem, and it was solved in the following manner:--

All the available inhabitants of the town were called to join in a great
hunt. The rats were caught by every conceivable artifice; and, once
taken, were instantly and ferociously _smothered in onions_; the
corpses were then decently laid out on clean china dishes, and
straightway eaten with vindictive relish by the people of Looe. Never
was any invention for destroying rats so complete and so successful as
this! Every man, woman, and child, who could eat, could swear to the
extirpation of all the rats they had eaten. The local returns of dead
rats were not made by the bills of mortality, but by the bills of fare:
it was getting rid of a nuisance by the unheard-of process of stomaching
a nuisance! Day after day passed on, and rats disappeared by hundreds,
never to return. What could all their cunning and resolution avail them
now? They had resisted before, and could have resisted still, the
ordinary force of dogs, ferrets, traps, sticks, stones, and guns,
arrayed against them; but when to these engines of assault were added,
as auxiliaries, smothering onions, scalding stew-pans, hungry mouths,
sharp teeth, good digestions, and the gastric juice, what could they do
but give in? Swift and sure was the destruction that now overwhelmed
them--everybody who wanted a dinner had a strong personal interest in
hunting them down to the very last. In a short space of time the island
was cleared of the usurpers. Cheeses remained entire: ricks rose
uninjured. And this is the true story of how the people of Looe got rid
of the rats!

It will not much surprise any reader who has been good-natured enough to
peruse the preceding pages with some attent