HAVE heard the tale of a rat which has much impressed me. The main points of the story are fact. There really was a rat that wore a silver bell! Though I have a certain respect for my imagination, I do not think so highly of it as to believe that I could evolve anything so delightfully fantastic as that. Yes, there really was a rat that wore a silver bell! I have a friend who knows well the one who can validly vouch for it, since that one was instrumental in the fact's accomplishment.
The introductory circumstances are somewhat hazy in my memory. I believe it was a family quite out of the ordinary, whose mother was its leading spirit; a woman of much insight, so much insight, in fact, that she was perpetually gentle. Consistently, then, and very especially, she was gentle with animals, and had an affection and respect for them not unallied, I should say, with the classic affection and respect of Saint Francis, for his little brothers, the birds and the fishes and the Wolf of Gubbio.
One instance of her gentleness stands out in my memory, in the recital. One of the little girls of the family had, by I know not what devious device, got hold of a small mouse by the tail. By this effective control she was able to souse the little creature in a pan of water and watch its reactions. Then, when it was tired of trying frantically to swim away from its own retained tail, the merciless small giantess would lift it free of the water for another chance at recovery, and when it was sufficiently recovered would again souse it into the pan of water. It might be said, if not altogether classically, that neither Tantalus nor Prometheus nor Ixion nor other much-tried gentlemen of fable had anything on this small, much-tried creature of real life.
Then, mercifully enough, enters the mother of the family! I am told she neither railed nor reproved—not, at least, by word of mouth.
She only took the little creature with all the gentleness of which she was capable, made it safe and snug in a flannel petticoat, and set it near the fire, there to recuperate bodily and to recover, if it might be, partially some former faith in mankind.
Whether this was a turning point in the career of the young person who had amused herself with sousing the little creature, I do not know. I should judge by what follows that it was. For there follows the rat with the silver bell!
He had been caught not in a trap of snapping jaws, but in one of those falsely alluring ones which offer easy access to cheese and then, when the cheese is all eaten, present nothing but pointed spikes by way of exit. This spares the enticed rat any bodily cruelty, of course, but may be, I should think, a fruitful source of rat mental anguish. What will the family at home be thinking of this long detention? What worry for them! What anxiety for the prisoner! Rats are certainly not without inventiveness, but here was a difficult problem; and for rats whose philosophy is probably not of a very high order—wire bars do make both a prison and a cage.
Then came the discovery of him by the children of the household. Their idea was to tame him. Whether the gentle mother was away from home, or whether she was at home and approved of the taming, I do not know. Perhaps she thought the taming of the rat might serve incidentally for the taming of the children. That I leave to conjecture. I only know that under repeated efforts and ample replenishments of cheese and nuts, the rat became extraordinarily friendly. He was kept in confinement, to be sure, but little by little they let him out in a larger space, and he would of his own accord go back into his cage to sleep. So he became, in time, a tamed rat, tamed by education; a rat of a really superior order and experience.
By and by, whether it was that the novelty wore off, or whether it was qualms of conscience that overtook the young Brobdignagians who had educated him, I do not know, but it was determined to set him free. Before parting with him, however, one of them—it must have been that he or she was a silver-tongued poet in the making—thought of a tiny silver bell that was available; the sort of bell that would be used to ring fairies to dinner if there were fairies, and if they partook of dinner. This bell should be tied about the rat's neck—then they would know if he came back.