's cat.

Mop had absolutely no sense of fear or of animal proportions. As a
catter he was never equalled; a Yale-man, by virtue of an honorary
degree, he tackled everything he ever met in the feline way--with the
exception of the Princeton Tiger--and he has been known to attack dogs
seven times as big as himself. He learned nothing by experience: he
never knew when he was thrashed. The butcher's dog at Onteora whipped,
and bit, and chewed him into semi-helpless unconsciousness three times a
week for four months, one summer; and yet Mop, half paralyzed, bandaged,
soaked in Pond's Extract, unable to hold up his head to respond to the
greetings of his own family, speechless for hours, was up and about and
ready for another fray and another chewing, the moment the butcher's
dog, unseen, unscented by the rest of the household, appeared over the
brow of the hill.

The only creature by whom Mop was ever really overcome was a
black-and-white, common, every-day, garden skunk. He treed this
unexpected visitor on the wood-pile one famous moonlight night in
Onteora. And he acknowledged his defeat at once, and like a man. He
realized fully his own unsavory condition. He retired to a far corner of
the small estate, and for a week, prompted only by his own instinct, he
kept to the leeward of Onteora society.

He went out of Onteora, that summer, in a blaze of pugnacious glory. It
was the last day of the season; many households were being broken up,
and four or five families were leaving the colony together. All was
confusion and hurry at the little railway station at Tannersville.
Scores of trunks were being checked, scores of packages were being
labelled for expressage, every hand held a bag, or a bundle, or both;
and Mop, a semi-invalid, his fore paw and his ear in slings, the result
of recent encounters with the butcher's dog, was carried, for safety's
sake, and for the sake of his own comfort, in a basket, which served as
an ambulance, and was carefully placed in the lap of the cook. As the
train finally started, already ten minutes late, the cook, to give her
hero a last look at the Hill-of-the-Sky, opened the basket, and the
window, that he might wag a farewell tail. When lo! the butcher's dog
appeared upon the scene, and, in an instant, Mop was out of the window
and under the car-wheels, in the grip of the butcher's dog. Intense was
the excitement. The engine was stopped, and brakemen, and firemen, and
conductors, and passen