first the patriarch, white about the muzzle, grizzled all over, but still of eminent distinction.
Three sides of the cellar—for a hundred years the cellar had been the rats’ stronghold—were solid masonry. The fourth side was a wooden partition. At one corner of this stood the door, close-fitted to its sill and frame, and shrouded in cobwebs, which, in rats’ memory, had never parted. Along the wall opposite ran a six-inch shelf, and, at the extremity of this shelf, where the fittings entered the brickwork, was the entrance of the run.
Generations of rats had used that run. Its sides were smooth and polished as a metal tube. Here it was narrower, there wider, but throughout its length it was free and unimpeded.
For the most part it lay between wall and wainscot. At times it seemed to pierce the masonry itself. Midway in the ascent the path of least resistance had been towards the outer wall. Two round holes pierced its surface—a brick’s length dividing them. One can understand the making of the first hole, but the making of the second? Fifteen feet below resounded the busy traffic of the city. Did two tunnels converge by chance? did they converge by design? or was the second made by some colossal rat, stretched at full length, and trusting his life to his superhuman hearing? I can only state the facts. I do not pretend to explain them.
From the second hole the run passed into the masonry once more, zigzagged upwards into the storeroom, and ended.
From the storeroom there were countless exists—down the gutter into the courtyard (a short cut to the shambles), beneath the flooring to the scullery, and thence along the drain-pipe to the great sewer, through the ventilator on to the roof—anywhere, everywhere.
The scratching was certainly louder. The black rat was stepping very delicately, but a slippery corn-husk shot from underneath his foot, and with the rustle of the corn-husk the scratching ceased.
Nothing but a rat could have heard that; it was certainly a rat, but who?