hile, and say, with steadfast gaze, "Cat-soul, what are you? Where
are you? Whence come you? Whither go you?" But she only her whiskers,
and gives me no satisfaction.

But I saw at once that I must make a different disposition of Cheri.
It would never do to have him thus mauled. To be sure, I suppose the
cat might be educationally mauled into letting him alone; but why
should I beat the beast for simply acting after her kind? Has not the
Manciple, with as much philosophy as poetry, bidden,--

"Let take a cat, and foster hire with milke
And tendre flesh, and make hire couche of silke,
And let hire see a mous go by the wall,
Anon she weiveth milke and flesh, and all,
And every deintee that is in that hous,
Swich appetit hath she to ete the mous
Lo, here hath kind hire domination,
And appetit flemeth discretion"?

Accordingly I respected the "domination" of "kind," took the cage into
the parlor and hung it up in the folds of the window-curtain, where
there is always sunshine, wrapping a strip of brown paper around the
lower part of the cage, so that he should not scatter his seeds over
the carpet. What is the result? Perversely he forsakes his cup of
seed, nicely mixed to suit his royal taste; forsakes his conch-shell,
nicely fastened within easy reach; forsakes the bright sand that lies
whitely strewn beneath his feet, and pecks, pecks, pecks away at that
stiff, raw, coarse brown paper, jagging great gaps in it from hour to
hour. I do not mind the waste of paper, even at its present high
prices; but suppose there should be an ornithological dyspepsia, or a
congestion of the gizzard, or some internal derangement? The
possibility of such a thing gave me infinite uneasiness at first; but
he has now been at it so long without suffering perceptible harm, that
I begin to think Nature knows what she is about, and brown paper agrees
with birds. I am confident, however, that he would devout it all the
same, whether it were salutary or otherwise, for he is a mule-headed
fellow. I let him loose on the flower-stand yesterday, hoping he might
deal death to a horde of insects who had suddenly squatted on the soil
of the money-plant. He scarcely so much as looked at the insects, but
hopped up to the adjoining rose-bush, and proceeded to gorge himself
with tender young leaves. I tilted him away from that, and he
fluttered across the money-plant over to the geranium opposite.
Disturbed there, he f