been dead; two winkles under big
stones that took half-an-hour to shift; one dead pigmy shrew--length
two inches--with a hole in its skull, no brains, and a horrible smell;
nearly his life removed by the swoop of a kestrel falcon and the
javelin-stab of a heron's beak; and twenty minutes' hard cleaning to
remove the mud-stains that were not properly off--to his nice
liking--yet. And, to add to that, he had no sooner finished than he
found that some clumsy fool of a water-rat--vole, I mean--with a mania
for mining, had run a shaft into his hole, and brought the whole roof
crumbling down upon his scrupulously neat and tidy nest of fine hay and
carefully shredded rush--the only approximately warm corner he
possessed in all that biting cold--so that days of labor would not
repair the silly damage; and he had had to enter into a free fight with
and turn the fool out, nearly losing his life, for the fourth time that
short, dark, bitter day, in the process. And now he had to clean
himself all over again!

No wonder he was fed-up, and decided to quit. He loved the dank marsh,
the brackish channels, the long, lone wind blowing through the
tamarisks, and the smell--salt, seaweed, mud, and fish--of it all; but
in this--weather, when the cold here, even in shelter, was greater than
the cold in any other spot--and the unchecked wind cut like swords of
ice--he realized that one must be an eider-duck or an Iceland gull, a
northern diver or an Arctic owl, to stand it, and he was none of these.
Wherefore, though the dusk had made the dull day only a little more
dark as yet, and the pink, luminous frost-haze still hung in the west,
he called down his hole to his wife--his one and only wife, but that
was not his fault--and quitted.

Ten minutes later you behold our black rat--if you had eyes quick
enough, but it was a matter of momentary glimpses, anyway--trekking up
a ditch. You have pretty well got to take my word for it, because,
though sometimes you saw him for the half of a second, mostly you
didn't, and couldn't tell whether there was his wife only, or he only,
or both. Really there were both, but our black friend with the
embarrassingly, the abnormally, long tail and the genteel head--Mr.
_Mus rattus_ on Sundays, if you please, and in nowise to be confused
with that _canaille_, Citizen _Mus decumanus_, the common brown
rat--had not the slightest intention that any one should see him, if he
could help it. His wife might be t