No fewer than eleven rats were thus captured in succession at the mouth of one hole.

Altogether 150 were taken in the course of that summer.
Hugh kept a record of them by drawing a stroke with chalk for every rat on the red brick wall of the stable, near his ferret-hutch.

He only used a few traps--one was set not at a hole, but at a sharp curve of the brook--and the whole of these rats were taken in a part of the brook about 250 or 300 yards in length, just where it ran through a single field.

The great majority were water-rats, but there were fifteen or twenty house-rats among them: these were very thin though large, and seemed to be caught as they were migrating; for sometimes several were trapped the same day, and then none (of this kind) for a week or more.

Three moorhens were also caught; a fourth was only held by its claw in the gin; this one, not being in the least injured, he let go again.
It had been observed previously that the water-rats, either in making their burrows or for food, gnawed off the young withy-stoles underneath the ground in the withy-beds, and thus killed a considerable amount of withy; but after all this slaughter the withy-beds recovered and bore the finest crop they ever grew.