nts lie as it
guides them. Up or down is the law of quiet existence. The newt knew
nothing of this, and, when a rush of waters swept him into the river-bed
his natural instinct was to seek the bank. This laid him broadside and
helpless. A roach snapped idly at him as he floundered past the shoal. The
snap cost him his tail, and was probably his salvation. Without a tail
his biteable area was halved. A young trout missed him, and he pulled up
amid the lamperns in the shallows. The lamperns were too busily engrossed
to notice him. Each was fast anchored by its sucker to a rounded pebble.
Across their slender undulating bodies he struggled to the shore,
battered, bruised, and tailless, but alive. He entered the first brook he
came to, and there he remained a month in gloomy solitude, for he felt
that his chief glory had been taken from him. In a month's time his tail
had partially repaired itself. The new portion was stubby and colourless.
In another fortnight his crest had shrunk to half its former size. This
blow decided him. He left the water definitely. Where he went I cannot
tell you, nor do I know what happened to her, but I think they will meet
next year, and by that time his tail will be as beautiful as ever.

[Illustration: THE NEW PORTION WAS STUBBY AND COLOURLESS.]

THE PASSING OF THE BLACK RAT

(NOTE.--The old English black rat, for some three hundred years
predominant in this country, is now well-nigh extinct. He has been
superseded, some think exterminated, by the brown Hanoverian rat, a
more powerful and disreputable species, which made its appearance
in the course of the eighteenth century.)

The black rat sat back on his haunches, pricked up his ears, and listened.
It was something different to the faint lapping wash of the sewer;
different to the dull hum of the traffic. It was an uncanny, unfamiliar
scratching.

Every rat knows the scratching of his relations; but the black rat had no
relations.

Six weeks ago there had been at least two others of his kind in
existence--the one he had fought with, and the one he had most
unsuccessfully fought for. As a matter of fact, he had crawled away from
that encounter to die. Instead of dying, he had recovered. That his rival
was in reality the better rat he could not allow. Position is everything
in the rat _duello_, and position had not favoured him.

After a series of disastrous frontal attacks, he had limped behind the
o