led, have actually been killed and devoured by these
hideous _omnivora_.

Many such stories had been told me while I was a boy; and it was but
natural I should remember them at that moment. I _did_ remember them;
and under the influence of such memories, I felt a fear upon me very
much akin to terror. The rat, too, was one of the largest I had ever
encountered, so large that for a moment I could scarce believe it to be
a rat. It _felt_ as bulky as a half-grown cat.

As soon as I became a little composed, I tied up my thumb with a rag
torn from my shirt. The wound in a few minutes' time had grown
exceedingly painful--for the tooth of a rat is almost as poisonous as
the bite of a scorpion--and small as was the scratch, I anticipated a
good deal of suffering from it.

I need not add that the incident had banished sleep, at least for a
time. In reality I did not go to sleep again till nearly morning; and
then I awoke every minute or two with a start--from fearful dreams, in
which the vision was either a rat or a crab making to seize me by the
throat!

For hours before I slept at all, I lay listening to see if the brute
would return; but I did not note any signs of his presence for the
remainder of that night. Perhaps the _squeeze_ I had given him--for I
had come down rather heavily upon him--had frightened him enough to
hinder a repetition of his visit. With this hope I consoled myself,
else it might have been still longer before I should have slept.

Of course, the presence of the rat at once accounted for the
disappearance of my half biscuit, as well as for the damaged upper
leather of my buskin, which latter had been lying at the door of his
milder cousin the mouse. The rat, then, must have been prowling around
me all the while, without my having known of it.

During the hours I lay listening, before falling asleep again, my mind
was busy with one particular thought--that was, how I should manage in
case the rat should return? How was I to destroy--or, at all events,
get rid of--this most unwelcome intruder? I would at that moment have
given a year of my life for the loan of a steel trap, or any trap that
would take rats; but since the loan of a trap was out of the question, I
set my brains to work to invent some contrivance that would enable me to
rid myself of my unpleasant neighbour: neighbour I might call him, for I
knew that his house was not far off--perhaps at that moment he had his
den not three