'If they forget their places, and beat me,' snarled the Dog, 'I bite them, and they don't do it again. I should like to bite you, too, you nasty Cat; you have woke me up.'
'There may be truth in what you say,' said the Cat, calmly; 'but I think your view is limited. If you listened like me you would hear the men say it was all made for them, and you and I were made to amuse them.'
'They don't dare to say so,' said the Dog.
'They do, indeed,' said the Cat. 'I hear many things which you lose by sleeping so much. They think I am asleep, and so they are not afraid to talk before me; but my ears are open when my eyes are shut.'
'You surprise me,' said the Dog. 'I never listen to them, except when I take notice of them, and then they never talk of anything except of me.'
'I could tell you a thing or two about yourself which you don't know,' said the Cat. 'You have never heard, I dare say, that once upon a time your fathers lived in a temple, and that people prayed to them.'
'Prayed! what is that?'
'Why, they went on their knees to you to ask you to give them good things, just as you stand on your toes to them now to ask for your breakfast. You don't know either that you have got one of those bright things we see up in the air at night called after you.'
'Well, it is just what I said,' answered the Dog. 'I told you it was all made for us. They never did anything of that sort for you?'
'Didn't they? Why, there was a whole city where the people did nothing else, and as soon as we got stiff and couldn't move about any more, instead of being put under the ground like poor Tom, we used to be stuffed full of all sorts of nice things, and kept better than we were when we were alive.'