JILL'S CAT.

Where Jill's cat came from I have no idea; she just came. I first set eyes on her when one night, returning from dinner, I found her coiled up in an arm-chair in the drawing-room very fast asleep. So with a certain amount of mild, though I think, justifiable indignation, I thereupon opened the door of the room and the door into the garden, and advanced upon her clapping my hands and emitting loud and terrible noises in order to drive her out. But she merely stretched one paw with extreme laziness, looked at me with half a yellow eye, as if to say: "That noise is in deplorably bad taste, but I suppose you don't know any better," and went to sleep again.

This would not do at all, and though I was sorry to have to do it, thus violating the ancient and sacred rights of sanctuary, still it was impossible for me to give a home to any cat who might happen to come along. So I took her up with both hands, as M. Pierre Loti so justly advises, intending to put her bodily out into the garden and shut the door. But the moment I touched her she set up a loud tea-kettle purr, and still more than half asleep, licked with a rough pink tongue the hand that was near her head.

Now of all the curious qualities which cats possess, that of confidence in strangers is one of the rarest, and to the stranger who knows anything about them, certainly the most disarming. Most cats would have scurried angrily from the room at the rude noises I had made, and woke up all green distrustfulness on being touched. Not so Jill's cat; she just said: "Are you still there? How nice! Let's go to sleep again at once." So I told myself (without really believing it), that I would definitely drive her away in the morning, and left her in possession of her chair. But all my instincts told me that she had come to stay, and I know that if a cat really makes up its mind to do anything, that thing, unless you kill it, it will do.

Now most cats are absolutely without tact; they are obstinate, easily bored (shewing their boredom in a manner which it is impossible to mistake), and have the rooted conviction that the whole round world exists in order to amuse and interest them. But Jill's cat, so I firmly believe, had the tact

of all the other cats ever created, which accounts for their having none. For when the housemaid came into the room next morning to dust, Jill's cat greeted her at once as an old and valued friend, and went to meet her with little cries of welcome, making a poker of her tail. The housemaid in consequence, thawed by these well-bred manners, took her down into the kitchen to give her a saucer of milk before ejecting her. Jill's cat was hungry, and with the dainty eagerness of her race began to lick up her breakfast. But half-way through she suddenly froze into stone, but for the end of a twitching tail, and regarded with the eye of a Huntress the wainscoting opposite. Next moment a mouse was pinned by those velvet paws, and in less than another moment their was no mouse at all. The tail she did not care about, and deposited it, as a small token of homage and affection, at the feet of the cook. Then, this piece of diplomacy successfully carried through, she finished her milk, the walls of Jericho, so to speak, tottering to their fall at her assault.

But had Jill's cat known, there was a far more critical and hazardous passage still before her, for the house was ruled not by me, nor by the housemaid, nor even by the cook, that dispenser of succulence and joy, but by Jill, and Jill being young was capricious, and being far more highly born than any of us, was proud. Being also a fox-terrier she liked biting. She had slept as usual that night on various parts of my bed and me, and came down with me in the morning. I had forgotten for the moment all about the cat, and entered

M