extraordinary. The heron never even professed to follow it or lunge at
it. He preferred the water-vole, whose agility was not too fast to see.

At the place where it had come from, the mouth of the hole, it
stopped--this beast that could move quicker than eye could
follow--stopped so suddenly and completely that its change from almost
lightning motion to stony motionlessness in the fraction of a second
was nearly as amazing as its first marvelous exhibition. It stopped, I
say, and became a--a rat.

To nine hundred and ninety-nine people out of a thousand, the word
"rat" conveys only one impression. This rat did not fulfill that
impression. In fact, there is more than one kind of rat, and though
fate and their fathers' Kismet has cursed them all with a name of
shame, they are not all the kind of people that made it so. There is
the foreigner, the invader, the common brown rat, who is accursed;
there is the old English black rat, whom the accursed one has nearly
wiped out into little more than a ghost; and there is the water-rat,
who is not a rat, but a vole, and would thank you to remember the fact.

And this rat was a black rat, as black as jet, shark-jawed, star-eyed,
elfin-eared, snake-tailed, lean, long-legged, and graceful--a very
greyhound among the rats. He was there, in that dancing-floor of the
winds by the estuary, because no common or sewer rats were there. They
were anathema to him, and they were worse--death in many horrible
forms. He had been there all the summer, all the autumn, and all
the---- No, by whiskers! he was not going to remain there all the
winter. He had his limit, and he hated cold; and here, down by the
flat, sodden, mud-choked shore of the estuary, it was so cold that if
you didn't jolly well mind what you were up to and keep your tummy
always full, you went to sleep, and--never woke up any more.

A little pile of mussel, winkle, and shore-crab shells, and the
backbone of what had been a stranded fish, close to the mouth of the
hole, showed the rat's account-book to date; but there was a line to be
drawn even in this trade. That dawn--if you could call the gray dark
of a snowstorm dawn--he, wondrously adventurous, had gone shell-fish
collecting, away out upon the freezing wet mud-ooze. He had got three
mussels; a muddy face; muddier feet; nearly an eye pecked out by a
mighty, great black-backed gull; three chivyings from herring-gulls;
one nip from a crab who ought to have