A Plague of Mice

New Zealand Tablet, Volume XXXIII, Issue 28, 13 July 1905, Page 1

A Plague of Mice

Locust and mice plagues are visitations from which we are, happily, wholly free in this favojred coimtry. Some idea of what a plague of rodents is like may be gathered from tftc following paragraph which appeared in a recent issue of a Victorian paper :

' A resident of the Donald district, Victoria, killed 17,027 mice during the se\en weeks ending June 15.'

Some 'twelve years ago we personally witnessed a plague of mice (they wore really voles) in Western Victoiia. They swarmed in fields and barns and stables and dwellings alone; the path of imasion. They were a due calamity to householders, although they ne\«r attained the capacity for inflicting annoyance which was achieved by the rats of Ilamelin, which (according to Robert Browning) ' Fought the dogs, and Killed the oats, And bit the babies in the cradles, And ate the cheeses out of tbc \ats, And licked the soup from the cook's own ladles, Split open the kegs of salted sprats,

Made nests inside men's Sunday fiats, And even spoiled the women's chats, By drowning their sneaking With shrieking and squeaking In fifty different sharps and fla.ts.'

In ' Bab's ' ballads, Ferdinand underwent a long and toillsome search to find out, for his curious Elvira,. who wrote ' the pretty mottoes which you find inside the crackers.' A French sa\ant went still farther afield— in the* hinterlands of Algeria— to discover the original centre from which locusts went forth at irregular periods in devastating swarms. But scientists in Victoiia were nonplussed hy the onward march of myriad voles that came from nobody knew where, and went no one knew whither E\en the omniscience of ' Hie oldest inhabitant' was forced to capitulate to this eerie triple mystery of sudden fecundity, of migratory instinct, and of Pro\idential compensation in nature, winch scientific men find" so deep a riddle. In far-oil Norway there are big cousins of the Australian \ole (lemmings) that gather periodically and march steadily westward in \ast hordes. They fling; thccnscheM boldly mto the rivers that ftar their course , they scale the high hills , they swarm, through towns and hamlets, swening neither to right or left til they reach the shores of the ocean. They plunge into its waters and swim out ever westward until they are diowned, down to the last. Ships; have sailed through miles of the dead migrants. But evert Romanes, for all his keen guesses and ingenious theories, Jias been una/ble to sohe this strange mystery of migration.