138 SMALL DEER OUR RODENTS 
and independent ratcatching friends lately, in no 
pleasant terms, that he did not want his rats caught. 
The once admired song ' The ratcatcher's pretty little 
daughter ' is also a thing of the past, sharing the fate 
of another once familiar to some of us, ' Her roses 
and lilies all turned to tan, When she fell in love 
with the dogs'-meat man.' 
That much more pleasing animal, the black rat, 
is nearly exterminated, his species having given way 
to the far more powerful and ferocious brown rat. 
Now and again a solitary specimen is recorded, one 
of the last remnants of the so-called old-English 
black rat ; though, from what I have been able to 
gather, he is no more English than French or Irish. 
Rats can accommodate themselves to any circum- 
stance and every climate. They traverse the globe, 
paying nothing for their passage, and they land at 
our very antipodes without ceremony, to increase and 
multiply exceedingly in the land of their adoption, 
verifying truly the adage that ' Vermin breed fast' 
In the West Indies, notably, the brown rat has 
located himself in the fields of sugar-cane ; but so 
also has that deadly foe of his, that poisonous reptile, 
frequently of large size, called the fer-de-lance the 
horrible craspedo-cephalus that feeds on rats. If it 
only killed these, all would go well ; unfortunately, it 
