424 The Daintiness of the Rat 



completely, and leaving the peeled fruit, clean and without a 

 blemish, still attached to the branch which carried it. On one 

 tree there were eight or ten such freshly peeled lemons still in 

 their places on the tree, and they presented, among the others, 

 a very curious aspect of nakedness. Having boarded a man- 

 darin tree, the rat treats the fruit in the opposite way ; he eats 

 the inside and leaves the empty skins hanging on the tree. 

 On one tree that I saw, nearly the whole of the fruit had been 

 treated in this way. Something similar may be witnessed with 

 us on gooseberry bushes in a summer when wasps are abundant. 

 The reason for the different treatment of the two fruits is pro- 

 bably not to be sought further than in the fact that the inside 

 of the mandarin is sweet and that of the lemon sour. 



So long as there are mandarins and lemons, the common 

 orange remains untouched, but when there are no more of 

 these two they eat the common orange. By the time these are 

 finished the fields and woods outside are beginning to furnish 

 food, and the rats leave the garden, not to return until the 

 winter begins again. 



In answer to my inquiry, the gardener said the rats never 

 attempt to enter the villa; they are forest rats. I asked him 

 if they were a special kind ; he said they were brown rats ; and 

 I asked him if they were different from the rats he had seen 

 in England, and he said no. 



The daintiness of the rat, shown not only in the choice of 

 his fruit, but also in the part of it which he will eat, is not the 

 only feature of rat life which is illuminated by the experience 

 of the gardener of the Villa "Charles Gamier." The annual 

 migration back and forward from the open and natural sur- 

 roundings of the field and forest, where in summer food is being 

 naturally produced in abundance, to the restricted environment 

 of the highly cultivated garden, where in winter food is produced 

 only by artificial devices, becomes more remarkable the longer 

 it is contemplated. The whole area of semi-tropical garden 

 on the Riviera is an insignificant quantity compared with that 

 of the open ground, so that the proportion of the rat population 

 which is able to enjoy the winter villegiatura must be very 

 small, and must be chosen or evolved by a rigorous system of 



