The lake which the water-rat had made, with its islands and its cotters, was in its way useful, and not altogether despicable. The poor basket-makers, humble as they were, made good and useful baskets, mended pots and pans, split good clothes-pegs, and injured no man till Sibbold fired that fatal shot.
From that hour a curse seemed to hang over the place. A vast city, full of seething human life, had taken the place of the swamp and the bullrushes; the hearths of the poor cotters were gone, and huge hotels, club-houses, theatres, were there instead. Progress and development—yes; but with development came crime.
Under that overgrown city there extended a system of tunnels, sewers—some large enough to drive a horse and cart down them, others hardly large enough to admit the band. But they extended everywhere. Under the busy street, under the quiet office where the only sound was the scratching of the pen, or the buzz of a fly “in th’ pane;” under the gay theatre and the gossiping club-house there was not a spot that was not undermined.
And in these subterranean catacombs there dwelt a race nearly as numerous as the human hive above, who worked and gnawed in the dark; they were the domains of the successors of the little furred creatures which nibbled down the ancient willow tree. The grey sewer-rat worked and multiplied exceedingly beneath this mighty city. The grey rat was worse than the water-rat.
He had his human prototypes. What were Marese and Theodore but sewer-rats working in secret, in the dark underground, out of sight, whose presence could hardly be detected by a faint occasional scratching or rustle?
Beside these there were a numerous company of lesser men and masculine brutes, and female fiends, burrowing, fighting in the dark places of this mighty city, whose presence was made known at times by faint sounds of shrieking or devilish glee which rose up, as it were, from the bowels of the earth. The reign of the harmless water-rat was over. The rule of the sewer-rat was now in full force.
End of Volume One.