but the milk-pans are as clean as snow, and the
glass bowls as bright as silver.

Now, for the rats. Fanner Debenham, you
must know, is only a new comer to Stoneton;
his hereditary farm is in Wiltshire, "down away
at Cropmore," which he left because the landlord
was hard about the repairs, and would not
do the place up at all. The tenant he succeeded
was Farmer Pincher, who made a fortune in
the good old hard times, when the poor people
had some of them to live on grains, and
working men got meat once a week, and then
not too much of it. He was a wonder of
eccentricity even in this country of individualised
and eccentric people. He had grown very rich,
and one year his brother farmers at market
began to tease him about four very old wheatstacks
that stood round his farm-yard at Stoneton.
He was a sullen obstinate man. It
is supposed that he swore then and there, in
presence of them all, that he wouldn't thrash
them out for the next ten year; but of course
no one knew the terms of his oath, because he
made it secretly and silently. Years went on,
and the stacks sank and dwindled. They were
pierced, like colanders, with rat-holes; the thatch
rotted; weeds branched out on them; they
became no longer great loose hills of golden
grain, large as small houses, but mere black
clotted sops of spoiled grain; what once had
been worth pounds was now worth only pence;
the poor people in severe winters, or in bad
corn years, groaned at the wickedness of letting
food perish, from sheer wicked obstinacy; but
nothing could move Farmer Pincher. He would
reply nothing to any inquiry about the stacks,
but only growled, and walked away. He
chose it; it was his corn; it gave him a
wicked pleasure to show, visibly, how he could
afford to waste money; every day he passed
them, he felt that he was revenged. They were
the inn talk, the fireside talk, the cover-side talk,
the sportsmen's talk, were Pincher's wheatstacks.
How rich and dogged the man must
have been, who, let corn rise as it would, would
die rather than touch his four black stacks! I
believe that man was such a flint-and-iron pagan,
that he would have been cut into ounce pieces
rather than have thrashed those stacks until the
time of his oath had expired.

But, when Farmer Debenham came, it was
necessary that Pincher should either thrash or
destroy the four black stacks. And at last he
sullenly named a day for thrashing them.

"Begin and thrash those four old stacks on
Monday," was all he said. No joke, taunt, or
side-wind, could touch him. He said no more
about it. The same Monday, early, suddenly,
without wishing any old friend good-by, he and
his bad-tempered dog (who had tasted nearly
every boy's leg in the village) departed, with no
old shoes to celebrate their departure.

This Monday was the day on which I got to
Stoneton, and great was the excitement there.
The black ricks had for years brought the curse
of rats upon the village. Squire Harker's gamekeepers,
with their game-preserving, had
rendered the curse still more intolerable by killing
all weasels, ravens, stoats, hawks, owls, carrion-crows,
kites, polecats, and other creatures, that
live mainly on rats and mice, and such "small
deer;" the rats, first filling the stacks, had then,
overflowing from them, burst like an inundation
over the whole village. The poor people's
bacon and best clothes had been gnawn away;
the farmers' ducklings and chickens went off in
broods; the rats got into cupboards, presses,
drawers, boxes, lofts, preserve-rooms, stables;
got everywhere, and spoilt and devoured everything.

If the rats were unbearable, living, they
were insupportable, dead; for the sanitary
principles of extramural interment seemed grossly
disregarded by them, and they always contrived
to die in dining-rooms or under the floor of
bed-rooms, in studies, or under drawing-room
sofas. The noise, too! At night they were like
burglars, ghosts, rioters, and election mobs. I
could hear them drag weights about, chains
about, chairs about, and they were so violent
that nothing but knocking a nail into the
wainscot over the place stopped them. They
fell down the kitchen chimney; they bit the
cook's legs and the gardener's fingers; they
left their limbs in the traps, and were found
calmly drowned in the milkpans. I am quite
sure that if Moses had only tried the plague of
rats, that stubborn Pharaoh would have let the
Israelites go wherever and whenever they liked.
They were such big rats, too, with sloughing
tails, yellow teeth, naked feet, and eyes out of
which an undying and changeless malice stared
with cold cruelty.

Nothing stopped them, Farmer Debenham
said. Tar? Lord bless you, no. Broken glass?
Not a bit of it; arsenic they seemed to rather
like—a few died puffed out, or drank and
burst; the rest got wiser, avoided arsenic, and
grew more violent than ever. They gnawed the
corks in the cellar and they drank the wine;
they ate the potatoes, and they gnawed the
game in the larder. Life in Stoneton was no
longer a pleasure, and all owing to Farmer
Pincher's droves of rats.

The most extraordinary stories were told
of them. They were said to be met at night,
going down in long files to the ponds to drink;
and among them were often found some almost
denuded of hair—it was supposed from extreme
old age. What a rat purgatory for the
Debenhams; but, for a Chinaman, what a paradise,
was Stoneton!

I remember them at night, in Pincher's time,
when I was down staying with my friend the
rector; sometimes they had a Derby Day, sometimes
a congress, now and then a single combat.
It entirely explained to me the origin of ghosts,
and of all mysterious noises and haunted houses.

As for the stacks, they had (at the time
when Pincher left) become quite serious; they
swarmed, they heaved, they almost walked, with
rats—in the midst of which lived, it was reported,
one or two tax-collecting weasels, who
led the life of sultans. If you went at dusk