ells of unfathomed speech. "I have an eerie feeling," she said,
"that if he could talk he'd have great things to tell."

The minister laughed, and puffed away at his corncob pipe. "Tales of the
chase, my dear, of hecatombs of field-mice and squirrels!"

But she shook her head. "Not this summer--that cat has spent these last
two summers with human beings who have treated him as a kind of
fetich--just as we do!" As she rubbed his ear she murmured regretfully:
"To think of all you've heard and seen and done, and you can't tell us
one thing!"

The Yellow Cat's eyes narrowed to mere slits of black across two amber
agates; then he shook his ears free, yawned, and gave himself up to
closed lids and dreams. If he could have told it all, just as it
happened, not one word of it could those good souls have
comprehended--and this was the way of it.

It was near the close of a June day when the cat made his entrance into
that hidden life of the summers from which his exits had been as sudden,
though less dramatic. In the heart of the hills, where a mountain
torrent has fretted its way for miles through a rocky gorge, there is a
place where the cleft widens into a miniature valley, and the stream
slips along quietly between banks of moss before it plunges again on its
riotous path down the mountain. Here the charcoal-burners, half a
century ago, had made a clearing, and left their dome-shaped stone kiln
to cover itself with the green velvet and lace of lichen and vine. The
man who was stooping over the water, cleaning trout for his supper, had
found it so and made it his own one time in his wandering quest for
solitude. The kiln now boasted a chimney, a door, and one wide window
that looked away over the stream's next plunge, over other mountains and
valleys to far horizons of the world of men. This was the hermitage to
which he brought his fagged-out nerves from the cormorant city that
feeds on the blood and brains of humans. Here through the brief truce of
summer he found time to fish and hunt enough for his daily wants, time
to read, to write, time to dream and to smoke his evening pipe, to think
long thoughts, and more blessed than all--to sleep! When autumn came he
would go back with renewed life and a pile of manuscript to feed to his
hungry cormorant. He was chewing the cud of contentment as he bent to
his fish cleaning, when, glancing to one side where the fire, between
stones, was awaiting his frying-pan, he caught sight