and lick it by the half-hour together, trying
to make it set properly. But the moment she let it go up it would cock
again. I have heard her cry with vexation because of this.

One day a neighbouring cat came to see her, and the squirrel was clearly
the subject of their talk.

"It's a good colour," said the friend, looking critically at the supposed
kitten, who was sitting up on his haunches combing his whiskers, and
saying the only truthfully pleasant thing about him that she could think
of.

"He's a lovely colour," exclaimed our cat proudly.

"I don't like his legs much," remarked the friend.

"No," responded his mother thoughtfully, "you're right there. His legs
are his weak point. I can't say I think much of his legs myself."

"Maybe they'll fill out later on," suggested the friend, kindly.

"Oh, I hope so," replied the mother, regaining her momentarily dashed
cheerfulness. "Oh yes, they'll come all right in time. And then look at
his tail. Now, honestly, did you ever see a kitten with a finer tail?"

"Yes, it's a good tail," assented the other; "but why do you do it up
over his head?"

"I don't," answered our cat. "It goes that way. I can't make it out. I
suppose it will come straight as he gets older."

"It will be awkward if it don't," said the friend.

"Oh, but I'm sure it will," replied our cat. "I must lick it more. It's
a tail that wants a good deal of licking, you can see that."

And for hours that afternoon, after the other cat had gone, she sat
trimming it; and, at the end, when she lifted her paw off it, and it flew
back again like a steel spring over the squirrel's head, she sat and
gazed at it with feelings that only those among my readers who have been
mothers themselves will be able to comprehend.

"What have I done," she seemed to say--"what have I done that this
trouble should come upon me?"

Jephson roused himself on my completion of this anecdote and sat up.

"You and your friends appear to have been the possessors of some very
remarkable cats," he observed.

"Yes," I answered, "our family has been singularly fortunate in its
cats."

"Singularly so," agreed Jephson; "I have never met but one man from whom
I have heard more wonderful cat talk than, at one time or another, I have
from you."

"Oh," I said, not, perhaps without a touch of jealousy in my voice, "and
who was he?"

"He was a seafaring man," replied Jephson. "I met him on a Hampstead
tram, and we disc