Читать книгу Evenings at Home; Or, The Juvenile Budget Opened - John Aikin - Страница 18

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A large old house in the country was so extremely infested with rats that nothing could be secured from their depredations. They scaled the walls to attack flitches of bacon, though hung as high as the ceiling. Hanging shelves afforded no protection to the cheese and pastry. They penetrated by sap into the store-room, and plundered it of preserves and sweetmeats. They gnawed through cupboard-doors, undermined floors, and ran races behind the wainscots. The cats could not get at them; they were too cunning and too well fed to meddle with poison; and traps only now and then caught a heedless straggler. One of these, however, on being taken, was the occasion of practising a new device. This was, to fasten a collar with a small bell about the prisoner’s neck, and then turn him loose again.

Overjoyed at the recovery of his liberty, the rat ran into the nearest hole, and went in search of his companions. They heard at a distance the bell tinkle-tinkle through the dark passages, and suspecting some enemy had got among them, away they scoured, some one way and some another. The bell-bearer pursued; and soon guessing the cause of their flight, he was greatly amused by it. Wherever he approached, it was all hurry-scurry, and not a tail of one of them was to be seen. He chased his old friends from hole to hole, and room to room, laughing all the while at their fears, and increasing them by all the means in his power. Presently, he had the whole house to himself. “That’s right,” quoth he, “the fewer the better cheer.” So he rioted alone among the good things, and stuffed till he could hardly walk.

For two or three days this course of life went on very pleasantly. He ate, and ate, and played the bugbear to perfection. At length, he grew tired of this lonely condition, and longed to mix with his companions again upon the former footing. But the difficulty was, how to get rid of his bell. He pulled and tugged with his fore-feet, and almost wore the skin off his neck in the attempt, but all in vain. The bell was now his plague and torment. He wandered from room to room earnestly desiring to make himself known to one of his companions, but they all kept out of his reach. At last, as he was moping about disconsolate he fell in puss’s way, and was devoured in an instant.

He who is raised so much above his fellow-creatures as to be the object of their terror, must suffer for it in losing all the comforts of society. He is a solitary being in the midst of crowds. He keeps them at a distance, and they equally shun him. Dread and affection cannot subsist together.