98 IN A CHESHIRE GARDEN 



while we were in despair about them. We 

 tried poison, with the result that dead rats 

 made the kitchen uninhabitable and entailed 

 the expense and nuisance of taking up the 

 floor, and still they came. We tried every 

 kind of trap, we had the whole of the outside 

 walls examined, and every possible entrance 

 hole stopped, so at least we thought, but 

 still they came. At last we found that the 

 simple expedient of doing away with the 

 ashpit deprived the premises of their chief 

 attraction in a rat's eyes, for then we had to 

 burn on the kitchen fire all the vegetable and 

 other refuse that formerly found its way to 

 the ashpit, and provided such abundant and 

 appetizing food. Certain it is that since we 

 did this, more than twelve years ago now 

 (1912), we never have had a rat in the house. 



I have heard of large young fowls being 

 killed by rats at farms not far away, but I do 

 not remember that they ever took one of our 

 chickens; indeed, at a time when we used to 

 see many rats there, a hen sat in the stable 

 and safely hatched her chicks. I recollect 

 an old rat that used to come every day to feed 

 with the fowls without any objection to his 

 presence on their part. 



Rabbits were another great nuisance. 

 They had burrows among the tree-roots on 

 the river bank and no one seemed able to get 

 them out or to shoot them, so between what 

 they ate and what they dug up, we hadn't 



