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Updated: June 23, 2025
They skirted the giant nettles widely, for these huge weeds threatened them with poison-thorns a good inch long. Then round beyond the gnawed, dismantled stile they came abruptly on the huge cavernous throat of the most westerly of the giant rat-holes, an evil-smelling profundity, that drew them up into a line together.
John, he struck up an acquaintance with a rat-catcher and his curs, assisting them in their business, watching at the rat-holes where the ferrets were in, and being the best dog of all; for he never gave a false alarm, or failed to give a true one. The moment he saw his master, however, he cut his humble friends, and declined their acquaintance in the most comical manner.
He had come out of the moat, which was riddled at the sides with rat-holes, and had most probably been there hunting for rats when my wandering footsteps disturbed him and sent him home to his den; and making straight for it, as his way was, he came to my foot, and instead of going round drew himself over it.
And yet the portrait of this great ancestress, which served as a pattern to one who, at the ball, personated the long-deceased heroine en masque, is hopelessly lost in some garret. Those Creoles have such a shocking way of filing their family relics and records in rat-holes.
At this meal she used to arrange also to have the room re-papered and the chimney swept and the rat-holes stopped up there were three of these, one was on the left-hand side of the fire grate, the other two were under the bed, and Mary Makebelieve had lain awake many a night listening to the gnawing of teeth on the skirting and the scamper of little feet here and there on the floor.
There is no sign of a trench left in it the entrances of the dug-outs may be found here and there like rat-holes, about half a dozen of them, behind dishevelled heaps of rubbish. They open into craters now no doubt each opening has been scratched clear of debris a dozen times. You have to get into some of them by crawling on hands and knees.
"Bean't queer at all, as I can see, sir," says mine host, handing back our glass, "seeing as this here is the Blawing Stwun, his self," putting his hand on a square lump of stone, some three feet and a half high, perforated with two or three queer holes, like petrified antediluvian rat-holes, which lies there close under the oak, under our very nose.
By Jove! the buckle of my bridle is hot in my hand! Trot out a bit, and 'ware rat-holes. Ten minutes' trotting jerked out of Lowndes one very sage remark when he pulled up, sweating from every pore ''Good thing Spurstow's with him to-night. 'Ye-es. Good man, Spurstow. Our roads turn here. See you again next Sunday, if the sun doesn't bowl me over.
We took a stroll over the battle-ground, and saw the deep furrows plowed by the terrible shells, in which a horse might be buried. Here and there were interspersed "rebel rat-holes," as they were called, dug seven or eight feet deep, and nearly covered with planks and two or three feet of earth, in which they dropped themselves, after firing, to reload and be secure from flying shot and shell.
But the winds were warm now, and through the skylight the sunbeams illuminated the floor, showing all the rat-holes and wretchedness of decay. There was comfort out of doors in the daytime in the sky and the fields and all the "goings-on of life." And this night, after this talk with Tibbie, Annie did not much mind going back to the garret.
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