forget
the obligation. Though you are black and I am brown, no difference
between us shall ever be regarded. Let us be friends to the end of our
days!"

"Agreed!" I cried; "let's rub noses upon it!" and noses we accordingly
rubbed.

He never flinched from his word, that bold Whiskerandos. I never feared
him from that hour; no, not even when I knew that he was hungry, and had
tasted no food from morning till night; I knew that no extremity would
ever induce him to eat up his friend; and many a ramble have we had
together, and through many strange paths has he led me. I ventured even
into the haunts of the brown rats, for his presence was a sufficient
protection. None would have dared to attack me while he was beside me,--
I should hardly have been afraid of a cat!

I had naturally a fancy for roving, and a great desire to know more of
the world; and what better guide could I have had than the heroic
Whiskerandos? He had not, however, been so great a traveller as Furry,--
he had never yet crossed the water; but he and I determined, on some
favourable opportunity, to take our passage in a ship, and explore some
foreign region together.

There was but one subject on which Whiskerandos and I were ever in
danger of quarrelling. I had made up my mind-- and Furry, who was a very
learned rat, was quite of the same opinion-- that the ancestors of the
brown rats came over from Hanover to England with George I. We liked to
call them Hanover rats, but this gave great offence to the race, as it
made their antiquity so much less than that which we claimed for
ourselves.

"You affirm," Whiskerandos would exclaim, "that you came over from
Normandy in 1066, and we from Hanover in 1714, and that nothing was ever
heard of us before that time. I affirm that it is a calumny, a base
calumny! We came from Persia, from the land of the East; an army of us
swam across the Volga, driven by an earthquake from our own country.
Depend upon it, we were known there in ancient times, and went over
Xerxes' great bridge of boats, and nibbled at his tent-ropes and gnawed
his cheese while he fought with the Greeks at Thermopylae."

"After all," thought I-- I did not say it aloud, for the great weakness
of Whiskerandos was his pride of birth, his anxiety to be thought of an
ancient family-- "the great matter is not whether our ancestors do
honour to us, but whether by our conduct we do not disgrace our
ancestors."

CHAPTER V.

HOW BOB MET