We are often regaled in the newspapers with "brutally frank" accounts of people leaving their babies alone at home, and, upon returning, finding them frightfully lacerated by rats, slowly and reluctantly escaping from the scene. In like manner, they have become bold enough to attack solitary invalids in houses, who had work enough to defend themselves from, and to drive off, these ferocious little beasts, driven on by hunger like the true wolves of the wilderness.
Living or dead, man is bound to furnish food for the rat; and in church-yards, where, ghoul-like, they choose the night as their time of appearing, they demolish the skeletons, littering the ground with remnants of the white, shining bones.
VIII.—RATS IN BREWERIES, SLAUGHTER-HOUSES, MARKETS, STABLES, AND BARN-YARDS.
The writer, in the course of his many rat-hunting expeditions, has had occasion to observe the rats in the lower cellars of many large New York breweries, where beer was about all they could get to live on. The sage old rodents, I observed, that had become accustomed to this diet—and had noted scientifically its queer effects in large doses on the rat system—indulged in a moderate way, and became aged, good-natured, and fat, like some jovial, bald-headed old merchant of the human type. The young rats, however, that had been recruited from the neighboring houses, would proceed immediately to paint a limited part of the town quite crimson with much hilariousness and quantities of beer, after which they could be killed or caught without much bother, lying around through the passage-ways in a beastly intoxicated state. Here they lay, squealing faintly, and without concern, on their backs. We may find in this, if we care to look for it, a really valuable temperance lesson; for, when the rodents imbibed with moderation, they were of a strong and healthy race, and greatly looked up to in the gnawing community; but, when they quaffed too heavily, they became poets, and cared not for the affairs of this small earth, whereupon they were ignobly killed with a club by some base son of man. In slaughter-houses, they become so unconscious after having gorged themselves with a hearty dinner of hot blood and other warm offal, that hundreds of them could be picked up and massacred with but very faint resistance on the otherwise cautious rat's part.
In old markets, rats yet do valuable service as sanitary inspectors, by demolishing the amount of refuse and garbage; but in other channels they are the very demons of destruction. They are especially fond of cheese; and in the cheese-dealers' stalls they go at their work of procuring this in a highly artistic way. They drill holes through the flooring beneath the largest cheeses, and then work their way up and eat into them, consuming pounds upon pounds in a single night. The men sometimes find a large cheese with the interior scooped entirely out, leaving the rind, in hollow mockery, simply an empty, worthless shell. In the butchers' shops, the rats are connoisseurs in the quality of meat, always seeking out the primest portions of the beef in preference to any others.
Around barn-yards they destroy the grain, oats, and every species of fowl, from the smallest to the largest specimen. In going at their work of destruction, they spring upon the neck of the victims, and pierce and bite it through with their teeth. They then suck the blood first, or else eat into the flesh as they would into a cheese, often contenting themselves with the blood and leaving the carcass. In stables the harness and the axle grease, even, suffice to make a square meal for them in default of better fodder; they also make the horses frantic by fiendishly gnawing at their hoofs.
IX.—RATS AS WINE DRINKERS.
In a neat and cleverly written little book on Spain, it is observed that "in the wine cellars the bungs in the heads of the butts containing sweet wines had little square pieces of tin nailed over them. This was to protect them from the rats who otherwise get upon the edge of the butt, and lick the sweet wine which oozes through, then begin to nibble the bung, and go on, if they are let alone, till out rushes the wine in a stream." The effects of the rats' ingenuity seems to bear rather a kind intention toward his two-legged brother, described in the following: "This happened not long ago to a large tonel of the finest Pedro Jimenez, which, was stored with others in the ground-floor of a house, the owner of which was away in Seville, with the key, which he would trust to no one, in his pocket. One morning out came the bung, long nibbled by rats, and, about three hundred gallons of the wine ran out into the gutter. It was a queer sight, people rushing to dip it up with any vessel that came to hand, some of them presently using mops, and the small boys, who had found it was sweet, and lapped up as much as they could get at, lying around the street in various stages of intoxication," after the manner of our frisky friends, the joyous rats of the brewery cellars.
X.—DESTRUCTIVENESS.
The rat's bite, and especially that of old rats, is very poisonous, and its teeth are finely adapted for severe, quick, sharp, and deep cutting. It forms an urgent natural necessity for them, owing to the peculiar structure and growth of their teeth, to keep them incessantly working. The idea never comes to the rats of a possible breaking off of their tusks in attacking such flexible objects as bricks or lead, and the writer has seen cases in which the rats cheerfully went to work gnawing off corners of bricks and granite, in a persistent manner, so that they could make an opening large enough for their admission into a house. Nothing is exempt from their merciless teeth. They mutilate the woodwork on the valuable drawing-room chair just as readily as they would the dingiest, most plebeian sort of washtub, and they make sad havoc of upholstery of all kinds. They seem to have an especially lasting grudge against the transmission of knowledge, for books are gnawed and mutilated by them in immense quantities. They gnaw paper, from legal documents of the highest value (and many an important writing has been hopelessly destroyed by their agency), to the most worthless treatise on "Four-Fingered Mike; or, The Terror of Hoboken." Our clothing, shoes, hat-gear, etc., is turned out by the rats in a pitifully dilapidated condition. They also eat into lead pipes for the purpose of obtaining water, which it is hard for them to do without, although we have found that they can be without food for a much greater length of time. When the rats are pressed for drink on board ship, they lay low in the day-time, but in the evening they stealthily come out on the deck from the hold, in a long row, single file, in order to sip the moisture from the rigging.