from. Its atmosphere of solid dignity and petrified
conservatism seemed to cling to him. Why he left the club I am unable,
at this distance of time, to remember positively, but I am inclined to
think that it came about owing to a difference with the new _chef_, an
overbearing personage who wanted all the fire to himself. The butcher,
hearing of the quarrel, and knowing us as a catless family, suggested a
way out of the _impasse_ that was welcomed both by cat and cook. The
parting between them, I believe, was purely formal, and Thomas arrived
prejudiced in our favour.

My wife, the moment she saw him, suggested Henry as a more suitable name.
It struck me that the combination of the two would be still more
appropriate, and accordingly, in the privacy of the domestic circle,
Thomas Henry he was called. When speaking of him to friends, we
generally alluded to him as Thomas Henry, Esquire.

He approved of us in his quiet, undemonstrative way. He chose my own
particular easy chair for himself, and stuck to it. An ordinary cat I
should have shot out, but Thomas Henry was not the cat one chivvies. Had
I made it clear to him that I objected to his presence in my chair, I
feel convinced he would have regarded me much as I should expect to be
regarded by Queen Victoria, were that gracious Lady to call upon me in a
friendly way, and were I to inform her that I was busy, and request her
to look in again some other afternoon. He would have risen, and have
walked away, but he never would have spoken to me again so long as we
lived under the same roof.

We had a lady staying with us at the time--she still resides with us, but
she is now older, and possessed of more judgment--who was no respecter of
cats. Her argument was that seeing the tail stuck up, and came
conveniently to one's hand, that was the natural appendage by which to
raise a cat. She also laboured under the error that the way to feed a
cat was to ram things into its head, and that its pleasure was to be
taken out for a ride in a doll's perambulator. I dreaded the first
meeting of Thomas Henry with this lady. I feared lest she should give
him a false impression of us as a family, and that we should suffer in
his eyes.

But I might have saved myself all anxiety. There was a something about
Thomas Henry that checked forwardness and damped familiarity. His
attitude towards her was friendly but firm. Hesitatingly, and with a new-
born respect for cats, she