But I still held to my faith in the open air and, as soon as the kittens began to blink, Housewife Honeyvoice and I pulled out from the lumber that chokes up cellars under feminine charge the big wire box which had been the Castle Joyous of Robin Hood. Planted firmly on the grassplot outside the cellar door, with a cat-hole just large enough for Polly cut in the wire, it was so secure as to appease even her maternal fears. Every morning she marshaled her little troop out to this new abode, carefully drove them all in and tended them there until sunset, when she led them back to the cellar. All the cats in the vicinity came to call, but Polly was the very spirit of inhospitality. She always maintained an anxious guard against marauders and, at the approach of the most amiable old gossip, would fill up the wire doorway with her own slender body, spitting and bristling in the very face of the disconcerted guest. Cinderella, the most precocious of the kittens, observed with admiration this form of welcome and scandalized all observers by scampering to the door one day, as her mother was returning from a brief constitutional, and with all due ceremonies of defiance refusing her admission. After one astonished instant, Polly recovered her presence of mind, bowled out of the way that comical ball of impudence and made it her first parental duty, after entering, to box Cinder's ears.
As the kittens grew older, they had the run of the house, which they filled with elfin mirth of motion and reels of Puckish revel. Placed in a row on my desk, they would watch the moving pen with fascinated eyes, till one shy paw after another would steal out to investigate and presently there would be a flurry of funny antics all over a blotted page. By autumn they had all gone their ways to different households, except Esther's Daisy, whom we kept, but the joy of kittenhood was the only life they had. Doom, like a black cat hunting mice, speedily caught them all, unless, perchance, dogs and motors were kinder than we fear to Cinder, who, one winter day, after her morning saucer of milk, struck blithely out into the sunshine from the best of homes and never, though search, inquiry and advertisement did their utmost, was heard of again. Little Bub proved so puny that he was left with Polly, reinstated, much to her content, in her own kingdom, but not even her puzzled solicitude, varied by cuffings, could keep him alive. As for Topsy and Daisy, I have not the heart to tell how they perished, but though I say it as should not, Daisy was too bad for this world. An incarnate imp, she mocked all discipline and scorned all affection, capering into new mischief at every rebuke and scratching herself free from caresses. Despising laps and cushions, she took to the air like an aeroplane, forever on the leap from one forbidden shelf, mantel or flower-pot to another. Her agility was supernatural. She would hang from a curtain cord, spring thence to the top of a door, pounce on a bowing caller's back, and, within ten seconds fill the hall with such skurry and commotion that Hecate and all her witches could have done no more. She could not keep quiet, even at night, until Housewife Honeyvoice devised the plan of putting her to bed in a basket, with a cork dangling from the handle for her to play with in her dreams.
Joy-of-Life was ill that winter and, because the kitten's pranks would now and then divert a suffering hour, we bore with Daisy as long as patience could, until, indeed, she forsook the house and set up an independent establishment with a battered ruffian of a cat under our south porch. Before forsaking the house, she had derided everything in it. She had, indeed, an uncanny gift of singling out for her most profane attentions the special objects that humankind holds sacred. On the top of my desk stands a small Florentine bust of Dante, whose austere countenance she loved to slap. Beyond it hangs a cross of inlaid olivewood from Jerusalem, apparently inaccessible, but this infant athlete, precariously balancing with one foot on the curved woodwork of the desk and two feet clawing the wall, would stretch herself out like an elastic until her free foot could give the lower tip of the cross a smart rap and set it swinging. Punished, she would strike back, hitting us in the face with an absurd, soft paw; called, she would run away; caught, she would kick and bite. Our most tactful cajolery she met with suspicion and disdain, if not with open ridicule. Graceful as a whirling leaf, she was untamable as the wind that whirls it,—the wildest wisp of kittenhood that ever left an aching memory.
Since the tragic exit of Daisy, whose confidence I could never win,—and her cynical little ghost bids me admit that her distrust was borne out by the event,—I have counted myself unworthy to take any kitten to hearth and home. I doubt if any would come. My neighbors across the way have a lordly old Thomas, who, smelling dog on my skirts, spits at me as I mount the steps. My neighbors of the cross-cut have a glossy black puss in a resplendent red collar, who politely but unrelentingly evades all my advances. The feline heart has found me out. Yet I still cherish a wistful regard for these delicate-footed, wary creatures, who develop so suddenly from madcap frolic into dignity, discretion and reserve, keeping even in the most domestic surroundings a latent sense of a free life elder than civilization, when, as Swinburne tells his silken crony:
"Wild on woodland ways your sires
Flashed like fires."
A friend of mine, a scholar, and therefore proud in thought and poor in purse, living at the top of a London apartment house, had a cherished cat by name of Fettles, who never touched the ground from September to June. Rooms and corridor limited his promenades, except for a long box of plants that filled the diminutive balcony. To the casual eye he seemed well content with his cloistered life, purring on cozy cushions, performing painstaking toilets, cuddling down on the table close to the arm of his mistress as she read and wrote, even condescending, for her pleasure, to play with a tassel or ball, but I noted that my arrivals brought to Fettles a quivering excitement. It was not my conversation, which he ignored, nor my gifts, for after his first scandalous orgy on American catnip I was forbidden to bring him anything more tempting than a chocolate mouse. It was my boots, especially if I had been walking across Regent Park and brought in honest earth instead of pavement scraps and taxi smells. Fettles would rush to my feet and sniff at sole and heel and toe, arching his back and lashing his tail when the odors brought him peculiarly thrilling tidings of the strange world so far below his balcony. In the summer he was the guest of a Devonshire cottage, but for the first week or two he would be frightened by the vastness and queerness of out-of-doors. He would crouch for hours on the threshold, looking out with mingled ecstasy and terror on the garden, now and then reaching down a dubious paw to touch the warm brown earth. By degrees he could be coaxed to join his mistress at afternoon tea under the plum trees, cautiously placing himself in touch of the hem of her gown. The summer would be half over before he was at ease in his brief Paradise.
Fettles, by the way, was succeeded by Thomas Heywood, and Tommy Heywood by Sisi, the only Londoner I know who enjoyed the air-raids. Whenever a Zeppelin alarm scared the lodgers out of their "honey-heavy dew of slumber," Sisi had the sport of his life. Knowing that his mistress, even if a bomb were crashing through her ceiling, would not abandon him, he would dash hither and yon in a rapture of disobedience, now under the bed, now behind a bookcase, continually evading her frenzied clutches. Slippered feet went skurrying past the door, but still Sisi sprang and scampered, even wheeling about in giddy circles as if this were the chance of chances for a kitten to catch its tail. My friend, with Sisi clasped to her panting breast, was invariably the last lodger to reach the refuge of the cellar.
The cats of legend are not as many as one would suppose, or perhaps the fault is still mine. Even here they evade me. I can call but few to mind, Puss in Boots, Sir Tybalt in the animal epic of Reynard the Fox, the Kilkenny cats of tragic fame, the grinning Cheshire cat—for whose like I vainly looked in Cheshire—the mysterious Knurremurre of Norway, and the far-fabled "King of the Cats." English chronicles, none too authentic, tell of a busy mouser that made Dick Whittington mayor of London, and of a faithful puss who ventured down a chimney of The Tower to cheer her imprisoned master, the Earl of Southampton, by a call. More worthy of credit is John Locke's account, preserved by Hakluyt, of an honorable incident in his voyage to Jerusalem, undertaken in the spring of 1553. The pilgrim ship was about fifty miles from Jaffa, when it "chanced by fortune that the Shippes Cat lept into the Sea, which being downe, kept her selfe very valiauntly above water, notwithstanding the great waves, still swimming, the which the master knowing, he caused the Skiffe with halfe a dosen men to goe towards her and fetch her againe, when she was almost halfe a mile from the shippe, and all this while the ship lay on staies. I hardly beleeve they would have made such haste and meanes if one of the company had been in the like perill. They made the more haste because it was the patrons cat. This I have written onely to note the estimation that cats are in, among the Italians, for generally they esteeme their cattes, as in England we esteeme a good Spaniell."
Petrarch and Tasso are eminent witnesses to the Italian fondness for cats. The French, too, have long been famed as cat lovers; Montaigne, Chateaubriand, Gautier, Pierre Loti, Jules Lemaitre, Baudelaire, La Fontaine, Champfleury, Michelet have all written charmingly of the Fireside Sphinx, leaving it to a Belgian poet, Maeterlinck, to present poor pussy as a stage villain. English literature takes less account of her, though Chaucer keenly expresses the friar's choice of a comfortable seat by telling how