BROWN OR NORWAY RAT. 
25 
us and tried to shoot some of them, but the cunning rogues dived into the 
water whenever we approached, and swam off in various directions, some 
to one tree and some to another, so that we were puzzled which to follow. 
The rats swam and dived with equal facility and made rapid progress 
through the water. Many of them remained in the orchard until the 
freshet subsided, which was in the course of a few days. Whether they 
caught any fish or not during this time we cannot say, but most of them 
found food enough to keep them alive until they were able once more to 
occupy their customary holes and burrows. During these occasional 
floods on our western rivers, immense numbers of spiders and other in- 
sects take refuge in the upper stories of the houses, and the inhabitants 
find themselves much incommoded by them as well as by the turbulent 
waters around their dwellings. Such times are, however, quite holidays 
to the young folks, and skiffs and batteaux of every description are in re- 
quisition, while some go about on a couple of boards, or paddle from street 
to street on large square pine logs. When the flats are thus covered, 
there is generally but little current running on them, although the main 
channel of the river flows majestically onward, covered with floating logs 
and the fragments of sheds, haystacks, &c., which have left their quiet homes 
on the sides of the river many miles above, to float on a voyage of discov- 
ery down to the great Mississippi, unless stopped by the way by the exer- 
tions of some fortunate discoverer of their value, who rowing out among 
t he drifting logs, roots and branches, ties a rope to the frail floating tene- 
ment, and tows it to the trunk of a tree, where he makes it fast, for the water 
to leave it ready for his service, when the river has again returned to its 
quiet and customary channel. Stray flat boats loaded with produce, flour, 
corn and tobacco, &c., are often thus taken up, and are generally found 
and claimed afterwards by their owners. The sight of the beautiful Ohio 
thus swelling proudly along, and sometimes embracing the country with 
its watery margin extended for miles beyond its ordinary limits, is well 
worth a trip to the West in February or March. But these high freshets 
do not occur every year, and depend on the melting of the snows, which 
are generally dissolved so gradually that the channel of the river is suffi- 
cient to carry them off. 
In a foi'mer work, (Ornithological Biography, vol. 1, p. 155,) we have 
given a more detailed account of one of the booming floods of the Ohio 
and Mississippi rivers, to which we beg now to refer such of our readers 
as have never witnessed one of those remarkable periodical inundations. 
Mr. Ogden Hammond, formerly of Throg’s Neck, near NeM^- York, furnished 
us with the following account of the mode in which the Norway Rat cap- 
tures and feeds upon the small sand clams which abound on the sandy 
VOL. II. — 4 
