LIFE IN WINTER NIGHTS 303 



and plenty of a corn-stack. Rats, like sparrows, cling to the 

 neighbourhood of man, but not so closely. Sparrows seldom 

 or never breed or roost many hundred yards away from a 

 human dwelling, or some such spot as a rickyard or rubbish- 

 tip, where they can thrive on the products or refuse 

 of man's labour. But rats at the beginning of summer 

 migrate in considerable numbers from houses into the arable 

 fields and copses, burrowing and breeding in the dry banks ; 

 and they do not all go back in winter. If we watch the 

 tunnelled bank of a lane or the edge of a dry pheasant- 

 covert on a moonlit night in December or January, the 

 number of the rats passing to and fro along their well-worn 

 runs gives us some slight idea of the enormous army of these 

 creatures in the whole country. For such spots are merely 

 their outlying settlements ; the mixed living that they pick 

 up on and about the corn and root fields, and the pheasant 

 food scattered in the copses, represent only a few minor items 

 in the vast bill of fare from which they pick their diet. 

 There is unusual point in the scientific Latin name of this 

 species decumanus, the tithe-collector; but the brown rat 

 often takes much more than a tithe of the vegetable and 

 animal produce of a spot where it abounds. It has a 

 versatility and ingenuity which would be admirable if they 

 were not so mischievous ; and it seems able to adapt its 

 tastes and habits to all conditions which promise it an 

 adequate living. In the copses and cornfields and rickyards 

 it seems to love dry soil for its burrows as much as a rabbit ; 

 yet it luxuriates in drains and sewers, and regularly haunts 

 wet streamsides, and the oozy banks of tidal creeks and 

 lagoons. This adaptiveness to varying conditions is one of 

 the characteristics which have enabled it in the last two 

 centuries to usurp the position formerly held by the black 

 rat, and to spread to the remotest islands. The black rat 



