HOUSEHOLD PESTS 259 



carpets were devoured ; and screams from the larder 

 from time to time announced the success of the 

 great practical joke, so long familiar to successful 

 rats, of leaping swiftly from a pie-dish when it was 

 wanted for the servants' supper. Though the best 

 that the house afforded was at their disposal, they 

 were dainty and capricious in their appetites, taking 

 infinite pains to secure what their fancy suggested 

 might prove new and interesting, either as diet or 

 furniture for their nests ; and the writer, after lying 

 awake for hours listening to the operations of the 

 enemy on a steep flight of stairs and in a wardrobe 

 in the passage above, discovered in the last a couple 

 of hard dumplings, made for the dog's breakfast, 

 which had been carried up the stairs, and hoisted 

 over a panel two feet high into this ancient piece of 

 furniture. Deliverance came at last, not by human 

 aid, but in the shape of the stable cat, which thereby 

 won for itself a seat on the hearthrug, and a local 

 reputation which rivalled that of its reputed ancestor 

 owned by Sir Richard Whittington. 



The sole virtue of rats in a house is that they 

 drive out the mice. The long - tailed and short- 

 tailed field-mice are chiefly gardeners' pests, eating 

 the mushrooms, store-peas and bulbs, as well as the 

 sown peas. They never touch any but good bulbs, 

 and the knowing gardener feels a melancholy satisfac- 



