The rats get upon my nerves, Cousin Ribby," said Tabitha.
Now this is what had been happening to Tom Kitten, and it shows how very unwise it is to go up a chimney in a very old house, where a person does not know his way, and where there are enormous rats.
The two rats consulted together for a few minutes and then went away.
Presently the rats came back and set to work to make him into a dumpling.
Else why does he use up anywhere to forty or fifty rats a week
Out of thirty rats there were seven dead,--starved to death.
And his dear looked at him in all his imperturbable, complacent self-consciousness of kindness, and saw herself the little rural school-teacher who, with Ella Wheeler Wilcox and Lord Byron as her idols, and with the dream of herself writing "Poems of Passion," had come up to Topeka Town to be beaten by the game into marrying the solid, substantial business man beside her, who enjoyed delight in the spectacle of cats and rats walking the tight-rope in amity, and who was blissfully unaware that she was the Robin Redbreast in a cage that put all heaven in a rage.
And you have heard that rats always leave a sinking ship?
And one big black rat, who seemed to want to say something to the Doctor, now crept forward timidly along the rail, watching the dog out of the corner of his eye.
People," said the rat, "always speak of it with a sneer--as though it were something dis- graceful.
Nothing could be extracted from them on cross-examination except that there might have been rats in the house, though they were not aware of it.
On the second occasion she said it was required by the cook for ridding the lower part of the house of rats.
As for the rats, I left the killing of them to the cook and the other servants, just as I should have left any other part of the domestic business to the cook and the other servants.
Whenever she caught a particularly big rat
, she would bring it up into the room where we were all sitting, lay the corpse down in the midst of us, and wait to be praised.
Even if I be likened to a rat
, I do not care, provided that that particular rat
be wanted by you, and be of use in the world, and be retained in its position, and receive its reward.