CH. VII.] A GOOD HAUL OF RATS. 239 



with the interior, he inserted his hand, when he 

 found that it terminated in a cul de sac full of large 

 rats. He set to work at emptying it, and pulled 

 out and killed, two and sometimes three at a time, 

 no less than twenty-six large rats, several others 

 succeeding in making their escapenot a bad haul, 

 considering that he received two-pence for every 

 rat killed. Whilst doing this he was not once 

 bitten, which he attributed to the fact that he 

 had, by closing the mouth of the hole with his 

 arm, kept the rats in darkness, when he said, you 

 may handle them with perfect impunity. After 

 he was gone, the bailiff thought he would try his 

 own luck at the hole, and, he, in his turn, suc- 

 ceeded in pulling out and adding nine others to 

 the bag. In doing this, however, probably not 

 being so well up to the work as the rat-catcher, 

 he received a pretty sharp bite across one of the 

 fingers. The rats had, of course, been driven into 

 the hole by the ferrets. 



I remember, when a boy, seeing an upright 

 skirting-board in some stables stripped off, in order 

 to discover the cause of a villanous stench which 

 issued from it, when it was found to proceed from 

 the bodies of nine large Rats, in a state of putre- 

 faction, closely jammed together with their heads 



