he was rather
disappointed at the size and number of the rats. She enquired:--"Was
they large rats, or small?" and would have preferred to hear that they
were about the size of small cats--not larger, for fear of
inconveniencing old Mrs. Picture. And a circumstance throwing doubt on
their number was unwelcome to her. For it appeared that old Mrs. Picture
slept with her fellow-passengers in a dark cabin, and no one might light
a match all night for fear of the Captain. And rats ran over those
passengers' faces! But it may have been all the same rat, and to Dolly
that seemed much less satisfactory than troops. She was rather cast
down about it, but there was no need to discourage Dave. She could
invent some extra rats, when he came back from school.

* * * * *

Lay down the book, you who read, and give but a moment's thought to the
strangeness of these two episodes, over half a century apart. One, in
the black darkness of an emigrant's sleeping-quarters on a ship
outward-bound, all its tenants huddled close in the stifling air; child
and woman, weak and strong, sick and healthy even, penned in alike to
sleep their best on ranks of shelves, a mere packed storage of human
goods, to be delivered after long months of battle with the seas, ten
thousand miles from home. Or, if you shrink from the thought that
Maisie's luck on her first voyage was so cruel as that, conceive her
interview with those rodent fellow-passengers as having taken place in
the best quarters money could buy on such a ship--and what would _they_
be, against a good steerage-berth nowadays?--and give her, at least, a
couch to herself. Picture her, if you will, at liberty to start from it
in terror and scramble up a companion ladder to an open deck, and pick
her way through shrouds and a bare headway of restless sprits above, and
Heaven knows what of coiled cordage and inexplicable bulkhead underfoot,
to some haven where a merciful old mariner, alone upon his watch, shuts
his eyes to his duty and tolerates the beautiful girl on deck, when he
is told by her that she cannot sleep for the rats. Make the weather
fair, to keep the picture at its best, and let her pass the hours till
the coming of the dawn, watching the mainmast-truck sway to and fro
against the Southern Cross, as the breeze falls and rises, and the
bulwark-plash is soft or loud upon the waters.

And then--all has vanished! That was half a century ago, and more. And