40 



THE RAT 



not let him see me, and soon a friend came up 

 looking very thin and hungry, and they began to 

 talk of the difficulty of getting a really nice 

 little dinner, with these late frosts, and our next- 

 door neighbour said that he had just managed to 

 get one of his own kids, but that he had had a hard 

 fight for it, and that ' the old woman down there ' 

 had bitten him badly. So that was why he was 

 licking his lips, partly because he was enjoying the 

 taste of a tender young rat, and partly to take the 

 pain out of the bite. I have had a good many 

 children of my own, two or three hundred perhaps, 

 but, as far as I can remember, I have never eaten 

 one, though I often thought of doing it. It is not 

 a bad way of punishing them, after all, in case they 

 should ever be naughty. I heard a man say once 

 that he always beat his boy whenever he saw him, 

 because he was either going into mischief or coming 

 out of it. If he had only eaten him at once, just 

 think what a lot of trouble would have been saved ! 

 'Little boy, little boy, come and be beaten,' 

 is what you have to learn, but we learn, ' Little 

 rat, little rat, come and be eaten,' and I think that 

 our lesson is the harder. 



Our mother was a dear, so soft and warm to 

 cuddle up against, when we were little tinies with 



