CH. VII.] A GOOD HAUL OF RATS. 239 
with the interior, he inserted his hand, when he 
found that it terminated in a cul de sac full of large 
rats. He set to work at emptying it, and pulled 
out and killed, two and sometimes three at a time, 
no less than twenty-six large rats, several others 
succeeding in making their escape—not a bad haul, 
considering that he received two-pence for every 
rat killed. Whilst doing this he was not once 
bitten, which he attributed to the fact that he 
had, by closing the mouth of the hole with his 
arm, kept the rats in darkness, when he said, you 
may handle them with perfect impunity. After 
he was gone, the bailiff thought he would try his 
own luck at the hole, and, he, in his turn, suc- 
ceeded in pulling out and adding nine others to 
the bag. In doing this, however, probably not 
being so well up to the work as the rat-catcher, 
he received a pretty sharp bite across one of the 
fingers. The rats had, of course, been driven into 
the hole by the ferrets. 
I remember, when a boy, seeing an upright 
skirting-board in some stables stripped off, in order 
to discover the cause of a villanous stench which 
issued from it, when it was found to proceed from 
the bodies of nine large Rats, in a state of putre- 
faction, closely jammed together with their heads 
