en the dogs sprang in, and one of the men jumped to the only
hole in the room they had not previously stopped up.

But the black rats! The brown rats died, at intervals, fighting
horribly, as cornered brown rats do. In five minutes they were, all
five, dead--that is, all that had come into the room and been cut off.
The black rats, however, in five minutes, were not dead. Nobody seems
to have seen them, after the hunt had once begun, till the others were
killed. Even then all four men aver that they could never rightly
swear that they saw them. They saw lines, and streaks, and flashes,
and whirls, and halos of black, which might have been rats--and the
dogs said they were--but no one could swear to it. At times these
giddy phenomena were among the rafters, at other times they were on the
floor, and yet again they were going up or coming down the walls; but
all the while both men and dogs seemed to be everlastingly too late,
and hunting them where, half-a-second before, they had been. In fact,
they perpetually had been, and were always where snapping jaws and
beating sticks were not.

At the end of half-an-hour the men, mopping their foreheads, even in
that cold, gasped, "Lor' love yer! Did yer ever see th' like?"

At the end of three-quarters of an hour the men flung themselves,
gasping, on to the sacks of flour, and the dogs, panting, on to the
floor--done. And the black rat and his mate, lively as ever, perkily
watched them from the rafters.

Then the men and dogs went away, the light went out, and presently
great sounds of war below suggested that the brown rats on the
ground-floor were having the time of their lives. So were the two
black rats, but a different sort of time. They were feasting upon meal
and grain. And there, so far as I know, as they were like birds,
flying among the rafters like black lightning if molested, they live to
this day.

IX

LAWLESS LITTLE LOVE

She rolled over and regained her feet in a flash, to find herself facing
a dark beast, with a huge, bushy, white tail, held up straight like a
pleased cat's--but this was a sign of warning, not pleasure--that shone
ghostily in the gloom of the mysterious, dread thorn-scrub. And the face
of the beast was the face of a black and grinning devil, and its eyes
shone red.

She stood there, shivering a little, with the tiny young thing crawling
weakly away from almost under her feet, and the long, vivid, raw gash
that the whi