Daisy: the autobiography of a cat

by Miranda Eliot Swan

I have one great pleasure—I can go out every fair day. I climb on the fence, but do not go away from our garden: for in the next house is a dog, and he is a poor, evil-dispositioned creature. He seems to hate me. Why he should want to make me answerable for his unhappiness, I cannot understand. Just as soon as I appear on the fence, he barks and barks till all the neighborhood is disturbed. I do not notice him, for I know it is a free country, and I have as good a right to the fence as he has to his garden.

Norah, the girl where we live, is very kind to me. She keeps the window open, and I can jump in just when I please. The good kind old "gentleman of the house" speaks very kindly to me, and I know he understands me, for one day when I reached over when that dog was barking, and hissed right in his face once or twice just to aggravate him, this nice old gentleman laughed, and said, "Smart Daisy!" And I enjoyed it. When I got over my madness at night, all alone in my basket, all asleep around me, I did think how sad it was, when I ought to be at peace with all the world, knowing that my life would soon end, to go and irritate that poor dog by hissing at him; it made me feel ashamed. But then, I suppose I shall do it again unless I stay in when he barks.

There was a very nice cat belonging to some people who had recently moved into one of the houses near. He was a real "out and outer." I never heard such a voice or such sentiments before. He said he wanted to kill! It was his mission! Let the rats and mice in the neighborhood beware! He was there. That was enough; they were doomed. He would make that back yard a battle-field.

I was carried right off my feet by his eloquence. "Good heavens!" I thought, "is his name 'Gladstone' or 'Bismarck'? What a loss to me! I shall never find another rat; he will kill them all."

When weeks and weeks passed on, and I had killed a few, though I did not tell him, he blustered so, I thought he had killed dozens. The nice cat in the next house told me that he had never killed one. She said, "He is a real coward." He is just like some men—all talk and brag, "great cry and little wool."

I did like that cat. She said she was very soon going into the country to live. She preferred it to the city. She said where she had lived there were six cats. She liked them, but preferred a change. They were all old cats and did not care to play. Three of them had no teeth, and all the soft pieces of meat were given to them. But they were very poor company. She could not help them, and was glad of a change; it was too much like "The Old Ladies' Home" for her. One of them, she said, was so crazy after valerian that it was given to her all the time, and it made her just ugly and very quarrelsome.

"Well," I remarked, "I am very glad to know of cats that are cared for. There are enough suffering around us to make our hearts ache."

"Yes," she said, "and I could tell you tales that would chill your blood."

I begged her not to. I told her I had seen enough to make me very unhappy, as I could not help them; but she would tell me one.

She said: "On this very street I saw a nicely dressed young man chase a poor cat, a half-starved creature, into a sewer hole and beat her in with his cane; then some boys joined him, and the boys filled in the opening and stayed there shouting and yelling till she must have been suffocated. And this fiend in shape of man came away, laughing. If we could read the papers and knew his name," she added, "probably we should read he had battered his wife's head with a shovel or killed his old father."