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Trench life is anything but pleasant, yet it is infinitely more conducive to confidence, courage, and enthusiasm than the rat-like existence of the Germans in foul-smelling, ill-lighted, unsanitary burrows far beneath the surface of the ground. Few men can remain for month after month in such a place and retain their optimism and their self-respect.

But Jerry had been love-selected and courage-selected. His ancestors had been deliberately and consciously chosen by men, who, somewhere in the forgotten past, had taken the wild-dog and made it into the thing they visioned and admired and desired it to be. It must never fight like a rat in a corner, because it must never be rat-like and slink into a corner. Retreat must be unthinkable.

The publisher, as L made quite bold to say to me, was little more than a "dodging, rat-like financial ferret," a "financial stool-pigeon for some trust or other," a "shrewd, material little shopkeeper." This because M was accustomed to enter and force a conversation here and there, anxious of course to gather the full import of all these various energies and enthusiasms.

Ella, her mouth agonized and drawn, was the first to speak after Bennie left the room. When she did speak she asked a question. "Who done this t' her?" she questioned. "Who done it?" Rose-Marie hesitated. She could feel the eyes of Mrs. Volsky, dumb with suffering, upon her she could feel Jim's rat-like gaze fixed, with a certain appeal, on her face. At last she spoke.

Hilarius thought he had never seen so strange a fellow. His hair was close cropped; ay, and his ears also. His eyes were very small and near together; his nose a shapeless lump; his lip drawn up showed two rat-like teeth.

Ten million years ago the highest animal on the earth was a reptile, or, at the most, a low, rat-like marsupial. The authorities tell us that, unless some cosmic accident intervene, the earth will remain habitable by man for at least ten million years.

Unable either to fathom or forecast the workings of the drink-maddened mentality masked by that rat-like face, Lanyard waited with a hand covertly grasping the automatic in his pocket. There was no telling; at any moment that murderous mania might veer his way. And he was not content to die, not yet, not in any event by the hand of a decadent little beast of a Boche.

"If you go near that window or scream," whispered the rat-like one, "I'll shoot!" A heavy voice, speaking suddenly from the doorway, shook Miss Farrar's jangled nerves into fresh panic. "She won't scream," said the voice. In the door Miss Farrar saw the bulky form of the sergeant, blocking her escape.

It's hard on her she's got a little girl who was always ailin' sickly from the first." He fumbled at his scrubby black beard, his rat-like eyes focussed on the ground. "One moment, Mr. Bergstein," said Thayor, suddenly turning on his heel and going into the house. Presently he returned and handed Bergstein an unsealed white envelope.

A SPARE, lean frame; a small head set forward upon a pair of sloping shoulders; a thin, sharp nose, and rat-like eyes; a flat, hollow chest; shrunk shanks, modestly retreating from their snuff-coloured hose these are the tokens which served to remind his friends of Ralph Briscoe, the Clerk of Newgate.