Front matter
Reading edition
E-text prepared by Louise Hope
This text uses UTF-8 (Unicode) file encoding. If the apostrophes and quotation marks in this paragraph appear as garbage, you may have an incompatible browser or unavailable fonts. First, make sure that your browser’s “character set” or “file encoding” is set to Unicode (UTF-8). You may also need to change the default font.
Typographical errors are shown in the text with mouse-hover popups. The word “invisible” means that the letter or punctuation mark is absent, but there is an appropriately sized empty space. The inconsistent handling of nested quotes, with single ‘’ or double “” quotation marks for the inner quote, is unchanged. Where two closing quotation marks are expected, only one was printed.
Preface The Rambles of a Rat Transcriber’s Note
POORER THAN RATS.
“The old blind rat had a bit of stick in its mouth, and the pretty black rat took the other end in his teeth.”—Page 25.