in his velvet coat is handsomer
than the robin, which is at best a bouncing, bourgeois sort of bird,
a true suburbanite, with all the defects of his class. But my friend
has no mercy on the mole because he destroys her garden,--her garden
which she despoils every morning, gathering its fairest blossoms to
droop and wither in her crowded rooms. To wax compassionate over a
bird, and remain hard as flint to a beast, is possible only to
humanity. The cat, following her predatory instincts, is at once more
logical and less ruthless, because the question of property does not
distort her vision. She has none of the vices of civilization.

"Cats I scorn, who, sleek and fat,
Shiver at a Norway rat.
Rough and hardy, bold and free,
Be the cat that's made for me;
He whose nervous paw can take
My lady's lapdog by the neck,
With furious hiss attack the hen,
And snatch a chicken from the pen."

So sang Dr. Erasmus Darwin's intrepid pussy (a better poet than her
master) to the cat of Miss Anna Seward, surely the last lady in all
England to have encouraged such lawlessness on the part of
a--presumably--domestic animal.

For the cat's domesticity is at best only a presumption. It is one
of life's ironical adjustments that the creature who fits so
harmoniously into the family group should be alien to its influences,
and independent of its cramping conditions. She seems made for the
fireside she adorns, and where she has played her part for centuries.
Lamb, delightedly recording his "observations on cats," sees only
their homely qualities. "Put 'em on a rug before the fire, they wink
their eyes up, and listen to the kettle, and then purr, which is
_their_ music." The hymns which Shelley loved were sung by the
roaring wind, the hissing kettle, and the kittens purring by his
hearth. Heine's cat, curled close to the glowing embers, purred a
soft accompaniment to the rhythms pulsing in his brain; but he at
least, being a German, was not deceived by this specious show of
impeccability. He knew that when the night called, his cat obeyed
the summons, abandoning the warm fire for the hard-frozen snow, and
the innocent companionship of a poet for the dancing of witches on
the hill-tops.

The same grace of understanding--more common in the sixteenth than
in the nineteenth century--made the famous Milanese physician,
Jerome Cardan, abandon his students at the University of Pavia, in
obedience to the decision o