Altogether, cats are funny things, and the more you study them the funnier you find them. That’s so!
Chapter Twenty One.
The Fireside Favourite.
The lines of some cats fall in pleasant places. Mine have. I’m the fireside favourite, I’m the parlour pet. I’m the beau idéal, so my mistress says, of what every decent, respectable, well-trained cat ought to be—and I looked in the glass and found it so. But pray don’t think that I am vain because I happen to know the usages of polite society, and the uses and abuses of the looking-glass. No cat, in my opinion, with any claim to the dignity of lady-puss, would think of washing her face unless in front of a plate-glass mirror. But I will not soon forget the day I first knew what a looking-glass meant. I was then only a cheeky little mite of a kitten, of a highly inquiring turn of mind. Well, one evening my young mistress was going to a ball, and before she went she spent about three hours in her dressing-room, doing something, and then she came down to the parlour, looking more like an angel than ever I had seen her. Oh, how she was dressed, to be sure! And she had little bunches of flowers stuck on all over her dress, and I wanted to play at “mousies” with them; but she wouldn’t wait, she just kissed me and bade me be a good kitten and not run up the curtains, and then off she went. Yes; I meant to be an awfully good little kitten—but first and foremost I meant to see the interior of that mysterious room. By good luck the door was ajar, so in I popped at once, and made direct for the table. Such a display of beautiful things I had never seen before. I didn’t know what they all meant then, but I do now, for, mind you, I will soon be twenty years of age. But I got great fun on that table. I tried the gold rings on my nose, and the earrings on my toes, and I knocked off the lid of a powder-box, and scattered the crimson contents all abroad. Then I had a fearful battle with a puff which I unearthed from another box. During the fight a bottle of ylang-ylang went down. I didn’t care a dump. Crash went a bottle of fragrant floriline next. I regarded it not. I fought the puff till it took refuge on the floor. Then I paused, wondering what I should do next, when behold! right in front of me and looking through a square of glass, and apparently wondering what it should do next, was the ugliest little wretch of a kitten ever you saw in your life—a long-nosed, blear-eyed, pingey-wingey thing. I marched up to it as brave as a button, and it had the audacity to come and meet me.
“You ugly, deformed little beast,” I cried, “what do you want in my lady’s room?”
“The same to you,” it seemed to say, “and many of them.”
“For two pins,” I continued, “I would scratch your nasty little eyes out—yah—fuss-s!”
“Yah—fuss-s!” replied the foe, lifting its left paw as I lifted my right.