A little pile of mussel, winkle, and shore-crab shells, and the backbone of what had been a stranded fish, close to the mouth of the hole, showed the rat’s account-book to date; but there was a line to be drawn even in this trade.  That dawn—­if you could call the gray dark of a snowstorm dawn—­he, wondrously adventurous, had gone shell-fish collecting, away out upon the freezing wet mud-ooze.  He had got three mussels; a muddy face; muddier feet; nearly an eye pecked out by a mighty, great black-backed gull; three chivyings from herring-gulls; one nip from a crab who ought to have been dead; two winkles under big stones that took half-an-hour to shift; one dead pigmy shrew—­length two inches—­with a hole in its skull, no brains, and a horrible smell; nearly his life removed by the swoop of a kestrel falcon and the javelin-stab of a heron’s beak; and twenty minutes’ hard cleaning to remove the mud-stains that were not properly off—­to his nice liking—­yet.  And, to add to that, he had no sooner finished than he found that some clumsy fool of a water-rat—­vole, I mean—­with a mania for mining, had run a shaft into his hole, and brought the whole roof crumbling down upon his scrupulously neat and tidy nest of fine hay and carefully shredded rush—­the only approximately warm corner he possessed in all that biting cold—­so that days of labor would not repair the silly damage; and he had had to enter into a free fight with and turn the fool out, nearly losing his life, for the fourth time that short, dark, bitter day, in the process.  And now he had to clean himself all over again!

No wonder he was fed-up, and decided to quit.  He loved the dank marsh, the brackish channels, the long, lone wind blowing through the tamarisks, and the smell—­salt, seaweed, mud, and fish—­of it all; but in this—­weather, when the cold here, even in shelter, was greater than the cold in any other spot—­and the unchecked wind cut like swords of ice—­he realized that one must be an eider-duck or an Iceland gull, a northern diver or an Arctic owl, to stand it, and he was none of these.  Wherefore, though the dusk had made the dull day only a little more dark as yet, and the pink, luminous frost-haze still hung in the west, he called down his hole to his wife—­his one and only wife, but that was not his fault—­and quitted.

Ten minutes later you behold our black rat—­if you had eyes quick enough, but it was a matter of momentary glimpses, anyway—­trekking up a ditch.  You have pretty well got to take my word for it, because, though sometimes you saw him for the half of a second, mostly you didn’t, and couldn’t tell whether there was his wife only, or he only, or both.  Really there were both, but our black friend with the embarrassingly, the abnormally, long tail and the genteel head—­Mr. Mus rattus on Sundays, if you please, and in nowise to be confused with that canaille, Citizen Mus decumanus, the common brown rat—­had not the slightest intention that any one should see him, if he could help it.  His wife might be trusted to look out for herself.  And for this reason, perhaps, his march was a progress to wonder at.