THE KING OF THE RATS 35 



of their own, not also "have a king and officers of 

 sorts " ? Why should they not choose the oldest 

 and most experienced of their number to be their 

 " guide, philosopher, and friend " ? I looked over the 

 hedge into the field from which the procession had 

 descended, and saw there a lot of cornstacks, with a 

 threshing-engine, which, with all its paraphernalia, 

 ready for use on the next morning, had apparently, 

 just arrived. My theory is that the uncanny 

 creature was a " king of the rats " ; that the " eye of 

 old experience " had taught him that the appearance 

 of a threshing-engine was the prelude to disaster 

 and massacre on the morrow, and that he gave, in 

 right of his office, and, as in duty bound, the signal 

 to be off. If, as is well known, rats instinctively quit, 

 in a body, an unsea worthy vessel before she puts out 

 on her last voyage; if they quit a crazy tenement 

 which is about to fall from lapse of time, or which, 

 like the house of Eugene Aram, is pre-doomed by 

 the guilt long successfully buried within it, but now 

 on his wedding morning to be revealed,* why should 

 they not quit a rick, under the guidance of, perhaps, 

 the one survivor, or of the oldest of the survivors, of 

 a previous massacre, and make off for the next group 

 of ricks ? I say again I put this forward only as an 

 * See Bulwer Lytton's Eugene Aram, Book V., ch. i. 



