A FARMER AND A RAT

Evening Post, Volume CXX, Issue 112, 7 November 1935, Page 4

A FARMER AND A RAT

A certain Awakino farmer may in future be seen going about his work attired in ballet tights or kilts —he has not yet determined which—but an experience which befell him on Saturday morning produced a determination to discard the more common form of nether garment (states the "Taranaki Herald"). This particular farmer lives near the top of the hill on the New Plymouth side of the Awakino township, and he calls at Awakino on Saturday mornings regularly in his fiveseater saloon car. Often when he opens the door to get into the car a rat jumps out, but that has happened so frequently in farm sheds that no one remembers it more than five minutes. On Saturday morning the rat did not jump out, but there was nothing unusual in that, either, so the farmer commenced his short drive to the post office. Half-way down the hill, which bends thereabouts, the driver, who was alone, made a wild dive for his left thigh. Had there been any passenger he might have been a^rmed: at the actions of the driver. As it was, the driver himself was considerably alarmed. The rat had run up his trouser leg, and the motorist held it by the tail through the leg of his trousers,, but that did not stop it struggling, nor did it eliminate the possibility of a bite. A rat in a corner is not to be trifled with and in order to make its fate certain he devoted more attention to it. Thereafter the story is short. The driver took his eyes off the road, so the car also left the road. It burst through a fence and plunged over the edge of a fiftyfoot bank. The front wheels spun while the undercarriage caught on two of the fence wires and there the car was suspended. The driver scrambled out, the rat fell from his trousers and escaped, and the story ended.