ship scamper up the rigging to
avoid a dog racing about the decks in a fit. It would never do, I
thought, for the crew of the _Spray_ to take a canine risk, and with
these just prejudices indelibly stamped on my mind, I have, I am
afraid, answered impatiently too often the query, "Didn't you have a
dog!" with, "I and the dog wouldn't have been very long in the same
boat, in any sense." A cat would have been a harmless animal, I dare
say, but there was nothing for puss to do on board, and she is an
unsociable animal at best. True, a rat got into my vessel at the
Keeling Cocos Islands, and another at Rodriguez, along with a centiped
stowed away in the hold; but one of them I drove out of the ship, and
the other I caught. This is how it was: for the first one with
infinite pains I made a trap, looking to its capture and destruction;
but the wily rodent, not to be deluded, took the hint and got ashore
the day the thing was completed.

It is, according to tradition, a most reassuring sign to find rats
coming to a ship, and I had a mind to abide the knowing one of
Rodriguez; but a breach of discipline decided the matter against him.
While I slept one night, my ship sailing on, he undertook to walk over
me, beginning at the crown of my head, concerning which I am always
sensitive. I sleep lightly. Before his impertinence had got him even
to my nose I cried "Rat!" had him by the tail, and threw him out of
the companionway into the sea.

As for the centiped, I was not aware of its presence till the wretched
insect, all feet and venom, beginning, like the rat, at my head,
wakened me by a sharp bite on the scalp. This also was more than I
could tolerate. After a few applications of kerosene the poisonous
bite, painful at first, gave me no further inconvenience.

From this on for a time no living thing disturbed my solitude; no
insect even was present in my vessel, except the spider and his wife,
from Boston, now with a family of young spiders. Nothing, I say, till
sailing down the last stretch of the Indian Ocean, where mosquitos
came by hundreds from rain-water poured out of the heavens. Simply a
barrel of rain-water stood on deck five days, I think, in the sun,
then music began. I knew the sound at once; it was the same as heard
from Alaska to New Orleans.

Again at Cape Town, while dining out one day, I was taken with the
song of a cricket, and Mr. Branscombe, my host, volunteered to capture
a pair of them for me. They wer