Battled With Rats

Awful Experience of a Woman In a Culvert Surrounded by Rodents.

An experience terrible enough to have been imagined by Edgar Allan Poe has befallen Mrs. Sarah Hart of Paisley.

She had been working in the fields and was on her way home on Saturday night when she mistook her way and by some means which she is unable to explain fell in a small stream which runs into the river Cart, Scotland.

Owing to a recent heavy rain the stream was in flood and was rushing along like a mountain torrent.  At a little distance down its course from Paisley the stream enters a culvert.

Swept into this tunnel, Mrs. Hart made frantic efforts to seize on something that would stay her progress and ultimately succeeded in gripping a projecting stone, on which, with a struggle, she found herself able to sit.

In terror of the darkness and the rush of water, she resolved to make an effort to fight against the stream and get out of the culvert.  The flood, however, was too strong for her, and she was again swept back.  She caught once more at the stone which she had just quitted and resolved to remain there for the night.

Then for the first time she found that the culvert was full of water rats.

Image caption: The Culvert was Full of Rats.

There must have been scores of them, she says, for they swarmed all over her, attacked her furiously and tore her clothing to rags.

For nearly eight hours she did battle with the rodents and spent a night of such intolerable agony that at length she gave up exhausted and, falling again into the stream, was carried out of the culvert and into the river Cart.

Here she recovered sufficiently to enable her to clutch at a plank, and at 7 o'clock in the morning, more dead than alive and quite unconscious, she was rescued by a constable.