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Updated: May 14, 2025
And here no muddy harbor reeks, no foul mouth of rat-haunted drains, no slimy and scraggy wall runs out, to mar the meeting of sweet and salt. With one or two mooring posts to watch it, and a course of stepping-stones, the brook slides into the peaceful bay, and is lost in larger waters. Even so, however, it is kindly still, for it forms a tranquil haven.
Water-swept and aslant, it was preferable to the noisome, rat-haunted dungeons which served as cabins. There, clinging to the stout halliards of the sheet, he gazed with amazement at the long lines of black waves, each with its curling ridge of foam, racing in endless succession from out the inexhaustible west.
The place was rat-haunted and full of strange holes and corners. Even by day, with the frank sunshine breaking through boarded windows and broken roof, it spoke of incident and adventure; by night it was eloquent of the past of smugglers, of lawless deeds, of Napoleonic spies. Raymond and Sabina stood and admired the old store.
Folk were passing to and fro in front of it; the North Sea tug still lay at the wharf beyond; a man who was evidently its skipper sat on a tub on its deck placidly smoking his short pipe but of Addie Chatfield or of Andrius there was no sign. And the silence in that crumbling, rat-haunted house was deeper than ever. "Guv'nor!" muttered Spurge, "How long is it since you see her?"
"Three cheers for gramper and grammer!" roared a six-foot scion as a safety valve for sundry unmasculine emotions, and three rousing hurras made the rafters ring, struck terror to the heart of the oldest inhabitant of the rat-haunted garret, and summarily woke all the babies.
Both Mr and Mrs Bruce received the girl so kindly that she did not know what to make of it. Mr Bruce especially was all sugar and butter�-rancid butter of course. When she went up to her old rat-haunted room, her astonishment was doubled.
He had woken in the night and seen it standing at his bedside, plague-defiled and hunger-wasted, and because of it he dreaded to sleep alone, especially in that creaking, rat-haunted mill, whose very board seemed charged with some tale of death and blood. Heavens! At this very moment he thought he could hear that dead voice calling down the gale.
The wonder to us was that this extremely irascible and venomous serpent should be living in a nest with a large family of opossums, for it must be borne in mind that the opossum is a rapacious and an exceedingly savage-tempered beast. This then was the world in which I moved and had my being, within the limits of the old rat-haunted foss among the enchanted trees.
The warm curtains drawn, and the fire blazing defiantly, the angel with the flaming sword to protect their Paradise from the frost, it was indeed a contrast to the sordid shop, and the rat-haunted garret. After tea they took it in turns to work and to read.
Our men in the trenches, and out of them, up to the waist in water sometimes, lying in slimy dugouts, lice eaten, rat-haunted, on the edge of mine-craters, under harassing fire, with just the fluke of luck between life and death, seized upon any kind of joke as an excuse for laughter, and many a time in ruins and in trenches and in dugouts I have heard great laughter.
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