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The craft approached us, I jumped into it, then through a little trap-door shaped like a rat-trap that one of the scullers threw open for me, I slipped in and stretched myself at full length on a mat in what is called the "cabin" of a sampan. There was just room enough for my body to lie in this floating coffin, which was scrupulously clean, white with the whiteness of new deal boards.
The steel trap used for catching foxes is of exactly the same form as the ordinary rat-trap, with this difference, that it has two springs instead of one, is considerably larger, and has no teeth, as these latter would only tend to spoil the skin.
"And what can you sing, sweet lad?" asked the Abbot, smiling with expectation and setting his hand to his best ear to assist his increasing deafness. "Shut your fool's mouth!" said Sholto under his breath to his brother. "Shut your own! 'Tis ugly as a rat-trap at any rate!" responded Laurence in the same key. Then aloud to the Abbot he said, "An it please you, sir, I can sing 'O Mary Quean!"
The tide was low and the circular sweep of the reef showed up irregularly, its black outlines sticking out of the vividly green water like jagged teeth. Much débris from the steamer was lying high and dry. It was an easy task for an athletic man to reach the palm tree, yet the sailor hesitated, with almost imperceptible qualms. "A baited rat-trap," he muttered. Then he quickened his pace.
No country is so wild and difficult but men will make it a theatre of war; concealed in the forest at the bottom of that military rat-trap, in which half a hundred men in possession of the exits might have starved an army to submission, lay five regiments of Federal infantry. They had marched all the previous day and night and were resting.
"You had better have brought us liberty," said Dan of the Howlet-hirst. Christie looked at the state of affairs with great surprise. "An I were to be hanged for it," he said, "as I may for as little a matter, I could not forbear laughing at seeing men peeping through their own bars like so many rats in a rat-trap, and he with the beard behind, like the oldest rat in the cellar."
I broke into a laugh, from which neither my politeness nor the woman's heightened color could save me, bought the cat and ordered the rat-trap without delay. That night, when Miss Fellows had "retired," she never "went to bed" in simple English like other people, I stole softly out in my stockings and screwed a little brass button outside of her door.
My advice is that we let them alone let them build their barricades as high and as strong as they please, and if they leave any outlets unobstructed, let our soldiers close them up in the same way. We have then got them in a rat-trap, surrounded by barricades, and every street and alley outside occupied by our troops. If there are a million in the trap, so much the better.
"None is so frightened at ghosts as a darky." "Ghost!" repeated Tom. "Do you mean to say there really is a ghost up there in that old rat-trap?" "Something," replied Nat. "We have heard that same scream before, and it does not sound like anything human." "Why in thunder didn't we go up and swat it?" asked Tom, quite disgusted that such an opportunity should have been missed.
King Corny, who had the command not only of boats, and of guns, and of fishing-tackle, and of men, but of carpenters' tools, and of smiths' tools, and of a lathe, and of brass and ivory, and of all the things that the heart of boy could desire, had appeared to Harry, when he was a boy, the richest, the greatest, the happiest of men the cleverest, too the most ingenious: for King Corny had with his own hands made a violin and a rat-trap; and had made the best coat, and the best pair of shoes, and the best pair of boots, and the best hat; and had knit the best pair of stockings, and had made the best dunghill in his dominions; and had made a quarter of a yard of fine lace, and had painted a panorama.
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