s in his head in proportion to his size than any
other created being? I saw him already in midsummer, drenched with
cold rains, chilled and perishing; but sharper eyes than mine had
marked his flight, and a pair of swift hands plunged after him into the
long grass that tangled his wings and kept him back from headlong
destruction. Amicable relations between Cheri and the cat are on a
most precarious footing. The cat was established in the house before
Cheri came,--a lovely, frolicsome kitten, that sat in my lap, purred in
my face, rubbed her nose against my book, and grew up, to my horror,
out of all possibility of caresses, into a great, ugly, fierce,
fighting animal, that comes into the house drenched and dripping from
the mud-puddle in which she has been rolling in a deadly struggle with
every Tom Hyer and Bill Sayers of the cat kind that make night hideous
through the village. This cat seems to be possessed with a devil every
time she looks at Cheri. Her green eyes bulge out of her head, her
whole feline soul rushes into them, and glares with a hot,
greeny-yellow fire and fury of unquenchable desire. One evening I had
put the cage on a chair, and was quietly reading in the room below,
when a great slam and bang startled the house. "The bird!" shrieked a
voice, mine or another's. I rushed upstairs. The moonlight shone in,
revealing the cage upturned on the floor, the water running, the seeds
scattered about, and a feather here and there. The cat had managed to
elude observation and glide in, and she now managed to elude
observation and glide out. Cheri was alive, but his enemy had attacked
him in the flank, and turned his left wing, which was pretty much gone,
according to all appearances. He could not mount his perch, and for
three days, crouching on the floor of his cage, life seemed to have
lost its charm. His spirits drooped, his appetite failed, and his song
was hushed. Then his feathers grew out again, his spirit returned to
him with his appetite, and he hopped about as good as new. To think
that cat should have been able to thrust her villanous claw in far
enough to clutch a handful of feathers of him before she upset the
cage! I have heard that canaries sometimes die of fright. If so, I
think Cheri would have been justified in doing it. To have a great
overgrown monster, with burning globes of eyes as big as your head and
claws as sharp as daggers, come glaring on you in the darkness,
overturn