Page:Greatest Short Stories (1915).djvu/130

Rh with my feet. Surely, I thought, there must be some fissure like those in which that ill-omened weed had found a place for its root! “There was none. My fingers became sore in busying themselves with the harsh and inhospitable stones. My feet slipped from the smooth and slimy masonry beneath the water; and several times my face came in rude contact with the wall, when my foothold gave way on the instant that I seemed to have found some diminutive rocky cleat upon which I could stay myself. “Sir, did you ever see a rat drowned in a half-filled hogshead—how he swims round, and round, and round; and after vainly trying the sides again and again with his paws, fixes his eyes upon the upper rim as if he would look himself out of his watery prison?

“I thought of the miserable vermin, thought of him as I had often watched thus his dying agonies, when a cruel urchin of eight or ten. Boys are horribly cruel, sir; boys, women, and savages. All childlike things are cruel; cruel from a want of thought and from perverse ingenuity, although by instinct each of these is so tender. You may not have observed it, but a savage is as tender to his own young as a boy is to a favorite puppy—the same boy that will torture a kitten out of existence. I thought then, I say, of the rat drowning in a half-filled cask of water, and lifting his gaze out of the vessel as he grew more and more desperate, and I flung my- 127