120 GAME PRESERVERS AND BIRD PRESERVERS. 



a fact that the animal ' alderman ' lived entirely 

 on dry biscuit. 



Yet these statements may give some 

 farmers the impression that game preservers 

 encourage rats. They are their sworn enemies, 

 and though it is not a keeper's business to 

 follow the rats and hunt them out of a 

 farmer's ricks and barns, when they in tlie sum- 

 mer months venture out into the hedgerows, he 

 always sees tliat they are destroyed as far as 

 is possible. 



A rat eats and kills everything a man 

 does not want eaten or killed. He does those 

 things he ought not to do, and doubtless 

 leaves undone other things. We must study 

 how to destroy him, for man lives as much by 

 destroying the creatures which injure him as by 

 encouraging those which are useful to him. 

 If rat-catching is not strictly one of the learned 

 professions, still no stupid man ever shone in it, 

 and a good rat-catcher is a blessing to his parish. 

 If we had many sons to bring out in the world 



