A WOMAN IN A RAT HUNT.

Nelson Evening Mail, Volume XI, Issue 200, 15 August 1876, Page 2

A WOMAN IN A RAT HUNT.

The other morning, a Burlington lady who lives out on West Hill, says the Burlington Tldwkeye was'rooved by reading the "city lyric" on the subject, to go down into the cellar to see how the moisture was. She did not go down, however, for the water was there before her, and had been there all nighr, and had driven the rots out to higher ground, like the poor people in happy hollow. She had not more than opsned the door, when a great rat sprang between her dress and pet— oh — ur—oh— skirt, and scrambled up to an kneasy resting place. The next instant the lady hod him in her nervous grasp, holding dress, skirt, and rat with a desperate grip, despite the wriggling and squirming of the rodent And back into the kitchen she went, and the matinee opened. The lady is a good church member, and has never taken a lesson in dancing in her life, but she walfzed across the kitchen, galloped through the sitting-room, and polkaed down the hail, and schottisched back into the dining-room, and reeled back into the kitchen, where she jigged and shuffled and pirouetted never missing a step, and furnishing her own music all the time, while ber sister and three children ran after hor, shrieking and waiting for help, under the impression that she had gone mad, and beseeching her to tell what was the matter. She told them at last, when the orchestra was out of breath, and when she told them they all shrieked io chorus and ran out of the room, but returned, climbed up on the table and begged her to let the rat loose. Perish tho thought said she. In ali her wild dance, while striving to quiet her nerves, she had clung to that rat. It had caused her too much fright to escape now. She held on to him and wasn't going to let him go till tha headsman was ready. A council of war determined that tho best way to kill a rat was to put him in a bag and pound or drown bim. The lady ordered the galleries cleared, and then, with many shrieks and tremblings but determined bauds, she emptied the rat into the bag that her sister had given her, and called io the family. When the house was again in session, the rat was chased into a corner of the bag, the lady who had captured it put her foot on the bag to keep him in his place, and her sister, poising the poker over the rat, took good aim, raised the poker high above her head, shut her eyes and averted her head so that- she might not see the carnage, and then summoning all her strength, struck the deadly blow. A loud, piercing scream, that curdled the blood with the intensity of its agony, followed the blow, and as the executioner opened ber eyes she beheld the unfottunate rat-catcher at tho other cud of the room, seated on the floor, swaying to and fro, nursing her bruised and beaten loot, while the rat, greatly frightened by the noise, ran out of the bag, jumped on the baby's head, and scared it into convulsions, leaped from the baby on to the table, flopped into a crock of butter, scrambled through a pan of milk' jumped off the table on to the windowsill, and run under the house to -conceal its emotion.