me leaping
over into the road. The thing sprang upon him out of vagueness into the
utmost clearness, the sharp, eager, round-eared face, the long body
exaggerated by its movement; and what particularly struck him, the pink,
webbed forefeet of the beast. What must have made it more horrible to
him at the time was, that he had no idea the thing was any created beast
he knew. He did not recognise it as a rat, because of the size. His
horse gave a bound as the thing dropped into the road beside it. The
little lane woke into tumult at the report of the whip and the doctor's
shout. The whole thing suddenly went fast.

_Rattle-clatter, clash, clatter_.

The doctor, one gathers, stood up, shouted to his horse, and slashed
with all his strength. The rat winced and swerved most reassuringly at
his blow--in the glare of his lamp he could see the fur furrow under the
lash--and he slashed again and again, heedless and unaware of the second
pursuer that gained upon his off side.

He let the reins go, and glanced back to discover the third rat in
pursuit behind....

His horse bounded forward. The buggy leapt high at a rut. For a frantic
minute perhaps everything seemed to be going in leaps and bounds....

It was sheer good luck the horse came down in Hankey, and not either
before or after the houses had been passed.

No one knows how the horse came down, whether it stumbled or whether the
rat on the off side really got home with one of those slashing down
strokes of the teeth (given with the full weight of the body); and the
doctor never discovered that he himself was bitten until he was inside
the brickmaker's house, much less did he discover when the bite
occurred, though bitten he was and badly--a long slash like the slash of
a double tomahawk that had cut two parallel ribbons of flesh from his
left shoulder.

He was standing up in his buggy at one moment, and in the next he had
leapt to the ground, with his ankle, though he did not know it, badly
sprained, and he was cutting furiously at a third rat that was flying
directly at him. He scarcely remembers the leap he must have made over
the top of the wheel as the buggy came over, so obliteratingly hot and
swift did his impressions rush upon him. I think myself the horse reared
up with the rat biting again at its throat, and fell sideways, and
carried the whole affair over; and that the doctor sprang, as it were,
instinctively. As the buggy came down, the receiver of the lam