ide when and where to enter their secluded domain. How admirable the
facility with which these mysterious beasts pass up or down high fences!
Ladders or stairs are superfluous. How can one possibly walk several
steps down a perpendicular board without falling headlong to the ground?
And still more strange,--how can one leap squarely against the same
fence, and run right up to the top?

[Sidenote: _THREE REGULARS._]

Soon after breakfast on every fair day the houses around began to give
up their cats. There were three in whose actions I became specially
interested. The most important, and the one to whom I felt the place
belonged by right of appreciating it, was a personage of dignified
manners, and evidently of rank in his own world, a magnificent silver
tabby, the beauty of the neighborhood. Next in interest was a
white-and-black cat for whom I had sincere respect because she lived
most amicably with two canaries whose cages were always within reach and
never disturbed. The third was to my eyes anything but attractive, being
a faded-looking gray tabby, who entered the place by a hole under the
fence next the apartment-house. She looked ill-used, as if her home life
was troubled by bad children, or a frivolous, teasing dog, or a raging
housekeeper who left no peace to man or beast.

For whatever cause, when, soon after breakfast, Madam Grey appeared on
the scene, she proceeded at once and in silence to the highest bare peak
of the hills, a sightly place where she could overlook the thick green
forest, with its shady walks and cool retreats, and have timely notice
of any approach from the street. On that point she found or made a
slight depression, and there she calmly dressed her fur, and then,
wrapping her robe around her (so to speak), slept hours at a time.

She never did anything on the lot except sleep, and she seemed totally
blind to the attractions of nature. I never saw her notice anything. As
soon as she awoke she went back through the humble portal to her flat.

This piece of woods was not merely a pleasure-ground. It was a
hunting-field as well, and the denizens of its quiet shades were not at
all averse to a little excitement of the chase, nor to a taste now and
then of wild game of their own catching. What was there I know not, but
I judge from the spasmodic character of the hunt that it was
grasshoppers.

The silver tabby and the white-and-black, who were daily visitors to the
place, never quarreled