300 CANADIAN TURF RECOLLECTIONS 



A CORNER ON RATS. 



On a November night about twelve o'clock I happened 

 to be sitting with several others around one of the big 

 stoves in the office of a well-known hotel in Montreal, 

 when the conversation turned on rats. 



It so happened that one of the night porters, whose 

 special duty it was to look after the fires — the hotel being 

 heated in the old-fashioned manner by stoves — was a 

 smart young chap recently from Old London and pre- 

 vious to his leaving the big town he had done quite a little 

 work in the rat-catching line. Now, at the time I speak 

 of the basement portion of the hotel swarmed with ro- 

 dents. At the approach of winter when there was no 

 longer food for them on the wharves, hosts of them 

 would travel up the sewers and seek in every direction 

 for what was eatable. 



The big kitchen of the hotel was a favorite trysting 

 spot of theirs, and the walls were in most places liter- 

 ally honeycombed where they had tunnelled their way 

 through. Cats by the dozen had been introduced for the 

 purpose of killing them off, but after a few weeks of 

 very vigorous exercise pussy would invariably become 

 satiated with the sport and retire from active business 

 and many times in this same place I have seen two or 

 three cats dozing on the bricks in front of the big range 

 and a dozen rats scampering about the room. 



On the night I allude to one of the party around the 

 stove was a New York drummer who had a decided an- 

 tipathy to rats and thought them a little the meanest 

 breed of vermin on the face of the earth, his opinion 

 being largely influenced from his having been once badly 

 frightened by a rat getting into his bed. The talk finally 

 turned to rat catching, and I offered to bet a bottle of 

 ^'fiz'' that I could find a man in the hotel who in thirty 



