The Progressive Farmer

MISTAKES ABOUT RATS.

Capt. Powell, late master of the bark Gray Eagle, in speaking to a reporter, turned some of the old sailors' superstitions bottom upward. Capt. Powell said that the impression that rats would leave a sinking ship was altogether fallacious, if the ship was in the ocean, as an ordinary rat had sense enough not to try to swim to a shore hundreds of miles distant. "That sort of thing," he said, "might work in Bear creek or somewhere up the head of the Potomac, but it's foolishness to tell me that anything livin' is goin' to leave a thing that is supposed to be sinkin' before the thing is actually sunk."—Baltimore Herald.