“Now here am I on this bright, beautiful summer morning, as fresh as a daisy, as happy as a king. Catch me sleeping in the house on a summer’s night!
“How sweetly the birds are singing, but how much more sweetly they will taste! What a glorious day I had of it yesterday all through! Put in an appearance at the parson’s breakfast-table, just for fashion’s sake, and pretended to drink the milk my kind mistress placed before me. Fairly won the old lady’s heart by rubbing my head affectionately against the canary’s cage. ‘Dear Tom,’ said she, ‘you would never touch the pretty bird?’ Oh! wouldn’t I, though?
“What a nasty old man that Farmer Trump is! I’m sure, if it wasn’t that I have a taste for pigeons, and am a little bit of a Columbarian, I would never have thought of looking at his lot, anyhow. Besides, I had only eaten two when in came he, and out went I. Well, if he didn’t take his gun and fire after me. Well, if he hadn’t done anything of the sort, he wouldn’t have shot his bantam cock.
“I didn’t go into that milk cellar of my own free will. It was purely accidental. I was chased by a dog, but being in, how could I, being only a thirsty cat, and amid such profusion, help helping myself to a drop of cream? And if the clumsy old dairymaid hadn’t thrown her shoe at me, she wouldn’t have broken the milk-house window. It was no business of mine. I met Master Black-and-tan outside, and warmed him. I gave him sore eyes. That old shoe brought luck with it, however, for about an hour after I found myself in a large and beautiful garden, filled with beds of the rarest flowers. It isn’t always you get a bed made for you, thinks I; so I scraped about me a bit, and went off to sleep in the sun. Where did that half-brick come from? I wonder. I’m somehow of opinion that it was meant for me. However, if people will use profane language, and heave bricks at the heads of unoffending cats, they mustn’t be astonished if they do smash the cucumber frame.
“I find it so much better to live in the free forest, because, if I live in the house, a day never passes that I do not get into a row, and I always get the worst of it. Only yesterday I looked in for a few minutes at tea-time, and there was Dumpling standing, with a yard of tongue hanging from one side of his mouth; and Master must pat him, and call him a fine fellow; then I jumped on the sofa-stool, and smacked him in the face, and Dumpling knocked down the stool to get at me, besides a cup and saucer, with his wisp of a tail, and I bolted through a pane of glass, and got blamed for that. Day before, a mouse was pleased to get behind a china vase, and I had to break the vase to get at it—I got blamed for that. Same day I ran away with a mackerel. That mackerel seemed positively to say, ‘Oh, pussy, do run away with me, and eat me in some nice, quiet corner.’ And I did; and, would you believe it, I was even blamed for that!
“I’m going to see Zelina to-night. Zelina is a beautiful black Persian angel, with hazel eyes and flowing fur, and a voice that would lure the larks from the sky. Zelina belongs to the barber, and I met her by appointment in the back garden, and found her very thick with three other fellows. That’s the worst of Zelina. But I fellowed them! For five minutes you wouldn’t have seen either of us for fluff, and at the end of that time little remained of the other cats save the teeth. Meanwhile Zelina looked calmly on. Then I wooed Zelina beneath the moon, and thrashed her, and beat her, and bit her, till at last she consented to fly with me to a foreign shore; but we made such a row that we awoke the brute of a barber, and he threw a basin of dirty water right over us, and there was no more foreign shore thought of. But I’ll see her to-night, sweet Zelina!”
I’ll conclude this paper with a rather curious anecdote, told me by Captain A. Brown, late of Arbroath, now of Chatham, Canada. “We have a cat,” says Captain Brown, “who brought up a kitten in a loft above the woodshed, until it was old enough to wean; she then brought it down to run about, but the dog (a puppy) would on every opportunity take the kitten in its mouth and drag it about. This the cat didn’t seem to like, so one day she took it in her mouth, and carried it along, on the top of the fence, to the nearest farm, a quarter of a mile off, where the kitten’s father lived. She placed the kitten at the male parent’s feet, gave it suck once more, then started off home along the fence, and never went near it again.”
This anecdote, for the truth of which the captain vouches, clearly proves that pussy has a much larger amount of reasoning power than most people give her credit for. It was just as though pussy had addressed the male cat thus:
“I’ve brought you your youngster, Thomas. It cannot live at home for the mischievous puppy. Goodness knows I’ve done my duty to him as a mother; now, hub, you have a turn. Time about’s fair-play, Thomas; good-bye.”