Last week a rat had somehow gotten into the upper floor of our house. It gnawed a hole through the plastic bin containing Kichiro Mayuzumi's food pellets. We had to lay out a box of rat poison where the pets couldn't get to it.

This evening Angelique discovered the rat, dead, in a corner of our laundry room. I went upstairs to dispose of it. It was, if I may say so, a cute rat, like something out of Beatrix Potter. It lay in a gentle, curled-up position, as though it'd known that it was dying and decided to look decent about it.

That was the second cute rat I saw; the first one was 15 years ago, before the house was remodeled, in our old kitchen.