It was the black rat.  Nor did he go straight.  He went, if I may so put it, every way at once, ending up with a merry-go-round dance with death—­the harrier was pouncing savagely—­round a tuft of grass, at such a speed that he looked exactly like the rim of a quickly spun bicycle-wheel—­a halo, that is to say, and nothing else.

And then—­he was crouched, panting, inside the hole, wondering whether his heart or his lungs would be the first to burst.  And then?  Oh, and then he—­cleaned himself, naturally and of course.  What else did you expect?  He was the original black rat of Old England, and one of the cleanest animals on earth.

Mrs. Ratus, having vanished past finding while the hunt to the hole was on, presently scented her lord out, when the night had come and the harrier was gone, and together, starting like antelope at every hint of a sound, they traveled up the ditch, and up the bank of a stream that the ditch folded into.

Once an owl—­the nomad, short-eared owl of the marshes—­let forth a hoot that would have sent a nervous lady into “astericks,” and sent them into no-where, as if it had detonated a charge of that lively mystery called T.N.T. under their dainty feet.  Once, just as they were lapping like dogs at the edge of the ice that was conspiring to span the brook, an otter shot up his head—­jaws wide and dripping—­almost under their long and pointed noses, and they, with one accord, and driven by their long tails acting as a spring, leapt simply into space.  At any rate, they could not be followed by mortal eye, wherever they did leap to.

And once they met a wandering cat.  And that cat seemed to go mad, for she shifted about the steep bank of that stream, and up, and about—­here she swore because the spikes pricked her—­and down a holly-bush, as if she had got a rocket tied to her tail.  She had not, of course.  She was hunting black rats.  I suppose she saw them.  If so, she was the only person who did, and I feel sure that, instant as she was, when she was up the bank or the holly-bush they were down it, and when she was down they were up.  Finally, when her lost temper had completely run her out of breath, she slouched away, spitting like a worn sparking-plug, and very much disgusted.  And—­the black rats cleaned themselves!

That night was not a profitable one.  The shell-fish of the estuary were gone, and there was little instead on the stream—­only snow, and the snow fell quietly at intervals throughout the night, hiding everything.  Rats, too, are creatures of warmth.  They hate cold as much as the writer, and these two black rats became very miserable.  They had no home, and did not know where to go; and, save for a few berries, they had nothing to eat.  Mercifully, they had plenty to drink, and that is an item with rats, who die in a very few hours if they cannot get a drink.