ten snuffed round the volumes, and even touched them with my
whiskers, but they seemed to me dead as clay. It must be some wonderful
talent, possessed only by man, which enables him to hear any voice from
them.

There was one large volume in particular, which Captain Blake called
"Shakespeare," from which he sometimes read extracts to his son. I heard
him say once that this very Shakespeare had been dead for more than two
hundred years. Is it not marvellous that his thoughts, preserved in
leaves of paper in some manner inexplicable to a rat, should survive
himself so long,-- that he should make others both laugh and weep when
he himself laughs and weeps no more?

As may be supposed, I took no great interest in the reading until my ear
was caught one evening by an allusion to my own race in Shakespeare,
"Rats, and mice, and such small deer." We had then a place in the
wondrous volume; this made me all attention, and more than once that
attention was rewarded by hearing of the race of Mus. One mention both
surprised and puzzled me. The rhyme still rests on my memory:

"But in a sieve I'll thither sail,
And like a rat without a tail,
I'll do-- I'll do-- I'll do!"

The _do_, of course, represents _nibble, nibble, nibble_; but the rat
without a tail is of some species of which I had never before heard,
and have certainly never met with.

When Neddy read to his father, it was from a different book; he called
it "History of the French Revolution." It might have been a history of
my race, for it seemed to be all about rats: democ-rats and
aristoc-rats; "doubtless," thought I, "tribes peculiar to France." Most
savage fellows the first seemed to have been-- to our race what tigers
are to cats, still more powerful, bloody, and destructive. I, like
others who jump at conclusions, and do not understand half of what
they hear, had made a ridiculous mistake. My vanity had led me to
over-estimate the importance of my family; but a conversation between
Neddy and his father undeceived me, and made me a sadder and a wiser
rat.

_Neddy._-- "Well, papa, I fancy that we shall have a great deal to see
at St. Petersburg-- palaces, churches, gardens, all sorts of sights! But
what I most want to see is the czar himself, the great autoc-rat of all
the Russias."

I gave such a start at this, that I dreaded for a moment that I had
betrayed my hiding-place. Here was another rat, and one so singular and
so great, that he was thought