l put it in the empty wire-cage, and
try if I cannot tame it for her.'

"Here was a reprieve, and a most unexpected one. No one who has not
believed himself to be just on the point of being smashed, can tell how
glad I was when I was set loose from the farmer's terrible gripe, though
only to find myself in a cage!

"But soon the longing for liberty came. I attempted to gnaw through the
wires, but they resisted my utmost efforts. The farmer watched me, spoke
to me, gave me food-- treated me like a creature that could feel. That
man has a gentle and kindly heart! At length I grew accustomed to my
master, and to see him approach my prison with food was the only
pleasure of my life. He ventured his finger between the bars, and I
never attempted to bite it. He released me at last from my cage,
and gave me a far warmer, snugger home-- in the pocket of his own
great-coat!"

At this point in the story Whiskerandos and I uttered expressions of
amazement.

"Wherever he went," continued Oddity, "I went too. He taught me many
things altogether new to a rat. It is our nature to take what we can
get,-- he taught me to see food and not to touch it! He never
suffered me to feel hungry: he conversed with me as though I were a
little companion, and never one blow did I receive from his hand, or one
kick from his heel! It was not in the nature of a quadruped to be
insensible to kindness like this!"

"And yet you owed it all to your piebald coat!" exclaimed I. "Never was
beauty such an advantage to a four-footed beast as ugliness has been to
you!"

"I found," pursued Oddity very quietly, "that Will Grange, my master,
was going to London, to be married to the young woman whom he had spoken
of as Mary. We travelled to the city together, I snugly sleeping, coiled
up in his pocket."

"And were you given to the lady?" said Whiskerandos.

"I was placed before her on a table, in a quiet little back-parlour, in
which she and my master sat together. She admired my appearance."

"No, no!" interrupted I, "that's impossible, I can believe anything but
that!"

"Well, then, she wished to gratify my master by appearing to do so. She
praised me, and fed me from her hand, and said that such a rat she never
had seen in her life. Then I crept under my master's chair, and there
very quietly remained, while he and his Mary talked over future plans
together.

"He told her of the various things that he had bought to make his home
more comfortable