Hurt him! not we! If ever I felt pity it was for those ragged little urchins. We were well-fed, but they were hungry; Nature had given us sleek warm coats, but they trembled with cold. It was very clear that it was much harder to them to support life than if they had been rats. I wondered if in this great city there were many such helpless children, and if there were none to care for them!
“I say, Ratto,” observed Oddity, licking his soft coat till the beautiful polish upon it made one almost forget its ugly colour, “’tis a pity that these children are so dirty; but may be they are not so particular about such matters as we rats.”
In time a sort of acquaintance grew up between me and the ragged boys. We ceased to fear each other, and I would venture almost close to Billy’s thin little hand when he had a crust of bread to eat, for he always broke off a little bit for me. The poor little fellow was crippled and lame, so he rarely left the shed. Bob often went out in the morning, and returned when it was growing dark, sometimes with food, and sometimes without it; but whenever he had anything to eat, he always shared it with his little lame brother. I see them now, crouched close up together for the sake of warmth. Sometimes Billy cried from hunger and cold, and his tears made long lines down his grimy face. Bob never cried, he suffered quite quietly; he patted his little brother’s shaggy head, and spoke kindly to him, in his dull, cheerless way. I felt more sorry for him than for Billy.
The little one was the more talkative of the two. Perhaps he was more lively in his nature; or perhaps, from having been a shorter time in a world of sorrow, he had not learned its sad lessons so well. I certainly never heard him laugh but once, and then it was when Oddity, who was more shy than I, ventured for the first time since Billy’s coming to cross the shed.
“Oh! look—look, Bob! what a funny rat! what a beauty rat!” he cried, clapping his bony hands together with childish glee.
It was comical to see the expression on Oddity’s blunt face on hearing this unexpected compliment, perhaps the first that he had ever received in his life. It was enough to have turned the head of a less sober rat; but he, honest fellow, only lifted up his snub nose with a sort of bull-dog look, which seemed to say, “Well, there’s no accounting for taste.”
“Bob,” said little Billy one evening, with more animation than usual, “I’se been a-watching the rats, and I saw—only think what I saw!”
“Eh, what did ye see?” replied Bob, drowsily, rubbing his eyes with the back of his hand. He looked very hungry and tired.
“I was a-watching for the fat spotted one which ran across yesterday, when out came creeping, creeping, two others”—the child with his fingers on the floor suited his action to his words,—“and one had some white on its back; it looked old and weak; and Bob, I saw as how it was blind.”
“A blind rat!” cried Bob; “’twould soon starve, I take it.”