too dry. Many old sailors claim to believe that rats will desert
at the dock an outward-bound ship that is fated to be lost at sea;
but that certificate of superhuman foreknowledge needs a backing
of evidence before it can be accepted.

Of all wild animals, rats do the greatest number of "impossible"
things. We have matched our wits against rat cunning until a
madhouse yawned before us. Twice in my life all my traps and
poisons have utterly failed, and left me faintly asking:
_Are_ rats possessed of occult powers? Once the answer to
that was furnished by an old he-one who left his tail in my steel
trap, but a little later _caught himself_ in a trap-like
space in the back of the family aeolian, and ignominiously died
there,--a victim of his own error in judging distances without a
tape line.

Tomes might be written about the minds and manners of the brown
rat, setting forth in detail its wonderful intelligence in quickly
getting wise to new food, new shelter, new traps and new poisons.
Six dead rats are, as a rule, sufficient to put any _new_
trap out of business; but poisons and infections go farther before
being found out. [Footnote: For home use, my best rat weapon is
rough-on-rats, generously mixed with butter and spread liberally
on very thin slices of bread. It has served me well in effecting
clearances.]

The championship for keen strategy in self-preservation belongs to
the musk-oxen for their wolf-proof circle of heads and horns.
Every musk-ox herd is a mutual benefit life insurance company.
When a gaunt and hungry wolf-pack appears, the adult bull and cow