Agremens of Cat Life.

Agremens of Cat Life.

Before we can thoroughly understand the ways and habits of any animal, we must try, in a manner, to put ourselves in that animal’s place, and thus be able to study life from its point of view.

I don’t believe that God made any creature to be otherwise than happy, and He has endowed each member of His creation with just that amount of reason and instinct which shall enable it to find its food and a place to rest in, make love in its own way, marry after its own fashion by civil contract bring up its young, and, in a word, be generally jolly. I found a poor bee this morning getting drowned in the water-butt. “Yes,” I said, “I’ll save your life, but I will give you as a treat to my pet spider.” Man has the proposing, but not the disposing. I laid my bee for one moment on the edge of the butt to dry, when whirr! away he darted through the bright morning sunshine, and my spider had to be content with a bluebottle for breakfast. This spider, I may tell you, is a very large and beautiful specimen, striped and marked like a silver tabby. He lives in an outhouse, and has a web, the network of which is a yard in diameter, with goodness knows how many feet of tack, and sheet, and stay, and guy. And a very amusing rascal he is, and not a bit afraid of me.

Nearly every day, I give him a bee with the sting out. (It is in the kaleidoscope of events; that some day I may leave the sting in, just to see how he feels it.) I place the bee in the web, and it is amusing to see how quickly my friend shins up the rigging he catches the bee by the shoulders, and makes him spin for a few seconds like a top, till he is completely enveloped in a gauzy shroud, and there is a big hole in the web. I tell my spider he shouldn’t make a hole in the web. “Never mind that,” he replies, “soon make that all right,” and sure enough next morning the web is nicely repaired, and the bee nearly eaten. I don’t think he eats all the bee himself. I am convinced that he has a little wife who lives somewhere in a corner, and that every day he is careful to send her a leg, or a wing, or a bit of the breast. Well, he is happy, I know. Hadn’t he a nice private house, without rent or taxes, maybe a wife, and a thriving business, to say nothing at all about the bee. I have studied cats as I have studied that spider. I have imagined myself that spider. I have been, or imagined myself to be, a cat a Tom, you know, and I can fully understand a pussy’s life and a pussy’s joys and sorrows.