Laura Spencer Portor

“ I HAVE heard the tale of a rat which has much impressed me. The main points of the story are fact. There really was a rat that wore a silver bell! Though I have a certain respect for my imagination, I do not think so highly of it as to believe that I could evolve anything so delightfully fantastic as that. Yes, there really was a rat that wore a silver bell! ”

“ Perhaps she thought the taming of the rat might serve incidentally for the taming of the children. That I leave to conjecture. I only know that under repeated efforts and ample replenishments of cheese and nuts, the rat became extraordinarily friendly. He was kept in confinement, to be sure, but little by little they let him out in a larger space, and he would of his own accord go back into his cage to sleep. So he became, in time, a tamed rat, tamed by education; a rat of a really superior order and experience. ”

“ For there follows the rat with the silver bell!
He had been caught not in a trap of snapping jaws, but in one of those falsely alluring ones which offer easy access to cheese and then, when the cheese is all eaten, present nothing but pointed spikes by way of exit. This spares the enticed rat any bodily cruelty, of course, but may be, I should think, a fruitful source of rat mental anguish. What will the family at home be thinking of this long detention? What worry for them! What anxiety for the prisoner! Rats are certainly not without inventiveness, but here was a difficult problem ”