THE CAT-HOOD OF MAURICE

To have your hair cut is not painful, nor does it hurt to have your

whiskers trimmed. But round wooden shoes, shaped like bowls, are not

comfortable wear, however much it may amuse the onlooker to see you try

to walk in them. If you have a nice fur coat like a company promoter's,

it is most annoying to be made to swim in it. And if you had a tail,

surely it would be solely your own affair; that any one should tie a tin

can to it would strike you as an unwarrantable impertinence--to say the

least.

Yet it is difficult for an outsider to see these things from the point

of view of both the persons concerned. To Maurice, scissors in hand,

alive and earnest to snip, it seemed the most natural thing in the world

to shorten the stiff whiskers of Lord Hugh Cecil by a generous inch. He

did not understand how useful those whiskers were to Lord Hugh, both in

sport and in the more serious business of getting a living. Also it

amused Maurice to throw Lord Hugh into ponds, though Lord Hugh only

once permitted this liberty. To put walnuts on Lord Hugh's feet and then

to watch him walk on ice was, in Maurice's opinion, as good as a play.

Lord Hugh was a very favourite cat, but Maurice was discreet, and Lord

Hugh, except under violent suffering, was at that time anyhow, dumb.

But the empty sardine-tin attached to Lord Hugh's tail and hind

legs--this had a voice, and, rattling against stairs, banisters, and the

legs of stricken furniture, it cried aloud for vengeance. Lord Hugh,

suffering violently, added his voice, and this time the family heard.

There was a chase, a chorus of 'Poor pussy!' and 'Pussy, then!' and the

tail and the tin and Lord Hugh were caught under Jane's bed. The tail

and the tin acquiesced in their rescue. Lord Hugh did not. He fought,

scratched, and bit. Jane carried the scars of that rescue for many a

long week.

When all was calm Maurice was sought and, after some little natural

delay, found--in the boot-cupboard.

'Oh, Maurice!' his mother almost sobbed, 'how _can_ you? What will your

father say?'

Maurice thought he knew what his father would do.

'Don't you know,' the mother went on, 'how wrong it is to be cruel?'

'I didn't mean to be cruel,' Maurice said. And, what is more, he spoke

the truth. All the unwelcome attentions he had showered on Lord Hugh had

not been exactly intended to hurt that stout veteran--only it was

interesting to see what a cat would do if you threw it in the water, or

cut its whiskers, or tied things to its tail.

'Oh, but you must have meant to be cruel,' said mother, 'and you will

have to be punished.'

'I wish I hadn't,' said Maurice, from the heart.

'So do I,' said his mother, with a sigh; 'but it isn't the first time;

you know you tied Lord Hugh up in a bag with the hedgehog only last

Tuesday week. You'd better go to your room and think it over. I shall

have to tell your father directly he comes home.'

Maurice went to his room and thought it over. And the more he thought

the more he hated Lord Hugh. Why couldn't the beastly cat have held his

tongue and sat still? That, at the time would have been a

disappointment, but now Maurice wished it had happened. He sat on the

edge of his bed and savagely kicked the edge of the green Kidderminster

carpet, and hated the cat.

He hadn't meant to be cruel; he was sure he hadn't; he wouldn't have

pinched the cat's feet or squeezed its tail in the door, or pulled its

whiskers, or poured hot water on it. He felt himself ill-used, and knew

that he would feel still more so after the inevitable interview with his

father.

But that interview did not take the immediately painful form expected by

Maurice. His father did _not_ say, 'Now I will show you what it feels

like to be hurt.' Maurice had braced himself for that, and was looking

beyond it to the calm of forgiveness which should follow the storm in

which he should so unwillingly take part. No; his father was already

calm and reasonable--with a dreadful calm, a terrifying reason.

'Look here, my boy,' he said. 'This cruelty to dumb animals must be

checked--severely checked.'

'I didn't mean to be cruel,' said Maurice.

'Evil,' said Mr. Basingstoke, for such was Maurice's surname, 'is

wrought by want of thought as well as want of heart. What about your

putting the hen in the oven?'

'You know,' said Maurice, pale but determined, 'you _know_ I only wanted

to help her to get her eggs hatched quickly. It says in "Fowls for Food

and Fancy" that heat hatches eggs.'

'But she hadn't any eggs,' said Mr. Basingstoke.

'But she soon would have,' urged Maurice. 'I thought a stitch in

time----'

'That,' said his father, 'is the sort of thing that you must learn not

to think.'

'I'll try,' said Maurice, miserably hoping for the best.

'I intend that you shall,' said Mr. Basingstoke. 'This afternoon you go

to Dr. Strongitharm's for the remaining week of term. If I find any more

cruelty taking place during the holidays you will go there permanently.

You can go and get ready.'

'Oh, father, _please_ not,' was all Maurice found to say.

'I'm sorry, my boy,' said his father, much more kindly; 'it's all for

your own good, and it's as painful to me as it is to you--remember that.

The cab will be here at four. Go and put your things together, and Jane

shall pack for you.'

So the box was packed. Mabel, Maurice's kiddy sister, cried over

everything as it was put in. It was a very wet day.

'If it had been any school but old Strong's,' she sobbed.

She and her brother knew that school well: its windows, dulled with wire

blinds, its big alarm bell, the high walls of its grounds, bristling

with spikes, the iron gates, always locked, through which gloomy boys,

imprisoned, scowled on a free world. Dr. Strongitharm's was a school

'for backward and difficult boys.' Need I say more?

Well, there was no help for it. The box was packed, the cab was at the

door. The farewells had been said. Maurice determined that he wouldn't

cry and he didn't, which gave him the one touch of pride and joy that

such a scene could yield. Then at the last moment, just as father had

one leg in the cab, the Taxes called. Father went back into the house to

write a cheque. Mother and Mabel had retired in tears. Maurice used the

reprieve to go back after his postage-stamp album. Already he was

planning how to impress the other boys at old Strong's, and his was

really a very fair collection. He ran up into the schoolroom, expecting

to find it empty. But some one was there: Lord Hugh, in the very middle

of the ink-stained table-cloth.

'You brute,' said Maurice; 'you know jolly well I'm going away, or you

wouldn't be here.' And, indeed, the room had never, somehow, been a

favourite of Lord Hugh's.

'Meaow,' said Lord Hugh.

[Illustration: 'If you think cats have such a jolly time,' said Lord

Hugh, 'why not _be_ a cat?']

'Mew!' said Maurice, with scorn. 'That's what you always say. All that

fuss about a jolly little sardine-tin. Any one would have thought you'd

be only too glad to have it to play with. I wonder how you'd like being

a boy? Lickings, and lessons, and impots, and sent back from breakfast

to wash your ears. You wash yours anywhere--I wonder what they'd say to

me if I washed my ears on the drawing-room hearthrug?'

'Meaow,' said Lord Hugh, and washed an ear, as though he were showing

off.

'Mew,' said Maurice again; 'that's all you can say.'

'Oh, no, it isn't,' said Lord Hugh, and stopped his ear-washing.

'I say!' said Maurice in awestruck tones.

'If you think cats have such a jolly time,' said Lord Hugh, 'why not

_be_ a cat?'

'I would if I could,' said Maurice, 'and fight you----'

'Thank you,' said Lord Hugh.

'But I can't,' said Maurice.

'Oh, yes, you can,' said Lord Hugh. 'You've only got to say the word.'

'What word?'

Lord Hugh told him the word; but I will not tell you, for fear you

should say it by accident and then be sorry.

'And if I say that, I shall turn into a cat?'

'Of course,' said the cat.

'Oh, yes, I see,' said Maurice. 'But I'm not taking any, thanks. I don't

want to be a cat for always.'

'You needn't,' said Lord Hugh. 'You've only got to get some one to say

to you, "Please leave off being a cat and be Maurice again," and there

you are.'

Maurice thought of Dr. Strongitharm's. He also thought of the horror of

his father when he should find Maurice gone, vanished, not to be traced.

'He'll be sorry, then,' Maurice told himself, and to the cat he said,

suddenly:--

'Right--I'll do it. What's the word, again?'

'----,' said the cat.

'----,' said Maurice; and suddenly the table shot up to the height of a

house, the walls to the height of tenement buildings, the pattern on the

carpet became enormous, and Maurice found himself on all fours. He tried

to stand up on his feet, but his shoulders were oddly heavy. He could

only rear himself upright for a moment, and then fell heavily on his

hands. He looked down at them; they seemed to have grown shorter and

fatter, and were encased in black fur gloves. He felt a desire to walk

on all fours--tried it--did it. It was very odd--the movement of the

arms straight from the shoulder, more like the movement of the piston of

an engine than anything Maurice could think of at that moment.

'I am asleep,' said Maurice--'I am dreaming this. I am dreaming I am a

cat. I hope I dreamed that about the sardine-tin and Lord Hugh's tail,

and Dr. Strong's.'

'You didn't,' said a voice he knew and yet didn't know, 'and you aren't

dreaming this.'

'Yes, I am,' said Maurice; 'and now I'm going to dream that I fight that

beastly black cat, and give him the best licking he ever had in his

life. Come on, Lord Hugh.'

A loud laugh answered him.

'Excuse my smiling,' said the voice he knew and didn't know, 'but don't

you see--you _are_ Lord Hugh!'

A great hand picked Maurice up from the floor and held him in the air.

He felt the position to be not only undignified but unsafe, and gave

himself a shake of mingled relief and resentment when the hand set him

down on the inky table-cloth.

'You are Lord Hugh now, my dear Maurice,' said the voice, and a huge

face came quite close to his. It was his own face, as it would have

seemed through a magnifying glass. And the voice--oh, horror!--the

voice was his own voice--Maurice Basingstoke's voice. Maurice shrank

from the voice, and he would have liked to claw the face, but he had had

no practice.

'You are Lord Hugh,' the voice repeated, 'and I am Maurice. I like being

Maurice. I am so large and strong. I could drown you in the water-butt,

my poor cat--oh, so easily. No, don't spit and swear. It's bad

manners--even in a cat.'

'Maurice!' shouted Mr. Basingstoke from between the door and the cab.

Maurice, from habit, leaped towards the door.

'It's no use _your_ going,' said the thing that looked like a giant

reflection of Maurice; 'it's _me_ he wants.'

'But I didn't agree to your being me.'

'That's poetry, even if it isn't grammar,' said the thing that looked

like Maurice. 'Why, my good cat, don't you see that if you are I, I must

be you? Otherwise we should interfere with time and space, upset the

balance of power, and as likely as not destroy the solar system. Oh,

yes--I'm you, right enough, and shall be, till some one tells you to

change from Lord Hugh into Maurice. And now you've got to find some one

to do it.'

('Maurice!' thundered the voice of Mr. Basingstoke.)

'That'll be easy enough,' said Maurice.

'Think so?' said the other.

'But I sha'n't try yet. I want to have some fun first. I shall catch

heaps of mice!'

'Think so? You forget that your whiskers are cut off--Maurice cut them.

Without whiskers, how can you judge of the width of the places you go

through? Take care you don't get stuck in a hole that you can't get out

of or go in through, my good cat.'

'Don't call me a cat,' said Maurice, and felt that his tail was growing

thick and angry.

'You _are_ a cat, you know--and that little bit of temper that I see in

your tail reminds me----'

Maurice felt himself gripped round the middle, abruptly lifted, and

carried swiftly through the air. The quickness of the movement made him

giddy. The light went so quickly past him that it might as well have

been darkness. He saw nothing, felt nothing, except a sort of long

sea-sickness, and then suddenly he was not being moved. He could see

now. He could feel. He was being held tight in a sort of vice--a vice

covered with chequered cloth. It looked like the pattern, very much

exaggerated, of his school knickerbockers. It _was_. He was being held

between the hard, relentless knees of that creature that had once been

Lord Hugh, and to whose tail he had tied a sardine-tin. Now _he_ was

Lord Hugh, and something was being tied to _his_ tail. Something

mysterious, terrible. Very well, he would show that he was not afraid of

anything that could be attached to tails. The string rubbed his fur the

wrong way--it was that that annoyed him, not the string itself; and as

for what was at the end of the string, what _could_ that matter to any

sensible cat? Maurice was quite decided that he was--and would keep on

being--a sensible cat.

The string, however, and the uncomfortable, tight position between those

chequered knees--something or other was getting on his nerves.

'Maurice!' shouted his father below, and the be-catted Maurice bounded

between the knees of the creature that wore his clothes and his looks.

'Coming, father,' this thing called, and sped away, leaving Maurice on

the servant's bed--under which Lord Hugh had taken refuge, with his

tin-can, so short and yet so long a time ago. The stairs re-echoed to

the loud boots which Maurice had never before thought loud; he had

often, indeed, wondered that any one could object to them. He wondered

now no longer.

He heard the front door slam. That thing had gone to Dr.

Strongitharm's. That was one comfort. Lord Hugh was a boy now; he would

know what it was to be a boy. He, Maurice, was a cat, and he meant to

taste fully all catty pleasures, from milk to mice. Meanwhile he was

without mice or milk, and, unaccustomed as he was to a tail, he could

not but feel that all was not right with his own. There was a feeling of

weight, a feeling of discomfort, of positive terror. If he should move,

what would that thing that was tied to his tail do? Rattle, of course.

Oh, but he could not bear it if that thing rattled. Nonsense; it was

only a sardine-tin. Yes, Maurice knew that. But all the same--if it did

rattle! He moved his tail the least little soft inch. No sound. Perhaps

really there wasn't anything tied to his tail. But he couldn't be sure

unless he moved. But if he moved the thing would rattle, and if it

rattled Maurice felt sure that he would expire or go mad. A mad cat.

What a dreadful thing to be! Yet he couldn't sit on that bed for ever,

waiting, waiting, waiting for the dreadful thing to happen.

'Oh, dear,' sighed Maurice the cat. 'I never knew what people meant by

"afraid" before.'

His cat-heart was beating heavily against his furry side. His limbs were

getting cramped--he must move. He did. And instantly the awful thing

happened. The sardine-tin touched the iron of the bed-foot. It rattled.

'Oh, I can't bear it, I can't,' cried poor Maurice, in a heartrending

meaow that echoed through the house. He leaped from the bed and tore

through the door and down the stairs, and behind him came the most

terrible thing in the world. People might call it a sardine-tin, but he

knew better. It was the soul of all the fear that ever had been or ever

could be. _It rattled._

Maurice who was a cat flew down the stairs; down, down--the rattling

horror followed. Oh, horrible! Down, down! At the foot of the stairs the

horror, caught by something--a banister--a stair-rod--stopped. The

string on Maurice's tail tightened, his tail was jerked, he was stopped.

But the noise had stopped too. Maurice lay only just alive at the foot

of the stairs.

It was Mabel who untied the string and soothed his terrors with

strokings and tender love-words. Maurice was surprised to find what a

nice little girl his sister really was.

'I'll never tease you again,' he tried to say, softly--but that was not

what he said. What he said was 'Purrrr.'

[Illustration: It was Mabel who untied the string and soothed his

terrors.]

'Dear pussy, nice poor pussy, then,' said Mabel, and she hid away the

sardine-tin and did not tell any one. This seemed unjust to Maurice

until he remembered that, of course, Mabel thought that he was really

Lord Hugh, and that the person who had tied the tin to his tail was her

brother Maurice. Then he was half grateful. She carried him down, in

soft, safe arms, to the kitchen, and asked cook to give him some milk.

'Tell me to change back into Maurice,' said Maurice who was quite worn

out by his cattish experiences. But no one heard him. What they heard

was, 'Meaow--Meaow--Meeeaow!'

Then Maurice saw how he had been tricked. He could be changed back into

a boy as soon as any one said to him, 'Leave off being a cat and be

Maurice again,' but his tongue had no longer the power to ask any one to

say it.

He did not sleep well that night. For one thing he was not accustomed to

sleeping on the kitchen hearthrug, and the blackbeetles were too many

and too cordial. He was glad when cook came down and turned him out into

the garden, where the October frost still lay white on the yellowed

stalks of sunflowers and nasturtiums. He took a walk, climbed a tree,

failed to catch a bird, and felt better. He began also to feel hungry.

A delicious scent came stealing out of the back kitchen door. Oh, joy,

there were to be herrings for breakfast! Maurice hastened in and took

his place on his usual chair.

His mother said, 'Down, puss,' and gently tilted the chair so that

Maurice fell off it. Then the family had herrings. Maurice said, 'You

might give me some,' and he said it so often that his father, who, of

course, heard only mewings, said:--

'For goodness' sake put that cat out of the room.'

Maurice breakfasted later, in the dust-bin, on herring heads.

But he kept himself up with a new and splendid idea. They would give him

milk presently, and then they should see.

He spent the afternoon sitting on the sofa in the dining-room, listening

to the conversation of his father and mother. It is said that listeners

never hear any good of themselves. Maurice heard so much that he was

surprised and humbled. He heard his father say that he was a fine,

plucky little chap, but he needed a severe lesson, and Dr. Strongitharm

was the man to give it to him. He heard his mother say things that made

his heart throb in his throat and the tears prick behind those green

cat-eyes of his. He had always thought his parents a little bit unjust.

Now they did him so much more than justice that he felt quite small and

mean inside his cat-skin.

[Illustration: He landed there on his four padded feet light as a

feather.]

'He's a dear, good, affectionate boy,' said mother. 'It's only his high

spirits. Don't you think, darling, perhaps you were a little hard on

him?'

'It was for his own good,' said father.

'Of course,' said mother; 'but I can't bear to think of him at that

dreadful school.'

'Well----,' father was beginning, when Jane came in with the tea-things

on a clattering tray, whose sound made Maurice tremble in every leg.

Father and mother began to talk about the weather.

Maurice felt very affectionately to both his parents. The natural way of

showing this was to jump on to the sideboard and thence on to his

father's shoulders. He landed there on his four padded feet, light as a

feather, but father was not pleased.

'Bother the cat!' he cried. 'Jane, put it out of the room.'

Maurice was put out. His great idea, which was to be carried out with

milk, would certainly not be carried out in the dining-room. He sought

the kitchen, and, seeing a milk-can on the window-ledge, jumped up

beside the can and patted it as he had seen Lord Hugh do.

'My!' said a friend of Jane's who happened to be there, 'ain't that cat

clever--a perfect moral, I call her.'

'He's nothing to boast of this time,' said cook. 'I will say for Lord

Hugh he's not often taken in with a empty can.'

This was naturally mortifying for Maurice, but he pretended not to hear,

and jumped from the window to the tea-table and patted the milk-jug.

'Come,' said the cook, 'that's more like it,' and she poured him out a

full saucer and set it on the floor.

Now was the chance Maurice had longed for. Now he could carry out that

idea of his. He was very thirsty, for he had had nothing since that

delicious breakfast in the dust-bin. But not for worlds would he have

drunk the milk. No. He carefully dipped his right paw in it, for his

idea was to make letters with it on the kitchen oil-cloth. He meant to

write: 'Please tell me to leave off being a cat and be Maurice again,'

but he found his paw a very clumsy pen, and he had to rub out the first

'P' because it only looked like an accident. Then he tried again and

actually did make a 'P' that any fair-minded person could have read

quite easily.

'I wish they'd notice,' he said, and before he got the 'l' written they

did notice.

'Drat the cat,' said cook; 'look how he's messing the floor up.'

And she took away the milk.

Maurice put pride aside and mewed to have the milk put down again. But

he did not get it.

Very weary, very thirsty, and very tired of being Lord Hugh, he

presently found his way to the schoolroom, where Mabel with patient toil

was doing her home-lessons. She took him on her lap and stroked him

while she learned her French verb. He felt that he was growing very fond

of her. People were quite right to be kind to dumb animals. Presently

she had to stop stroking him and do a map. And after that she kissed him

and put him down and went away. All the time she had been doing the map,

Maurice had had but one thought: _Ink!_

The moment the door had closed behind her--how sensible people were who

closed doors gently--he stood up in her chair with one paw on the map

and the other on the ink. Unfortunately, the inkstand top was made to

dip pens in, and not to dip paws. But Maurice was desperate. He

deliberately upset the ink--most of it rolled over the table-cloth and

fell pattering on the carpet, but with what was left he wrote quite

plainly, across the map:--

'Please tell Lord Hugh

to stop being

a cat and be Mau

rice again.'

'There!' he said; 'they can't make any mistake about that.' They didn't.

But they made a mistake about who had done it, and Mabel was deprived of

jam with her supper bread.

Her assurance that some naughty boy must have come through the window

and done it while she was not there convinced nobody, and, indeed, the

window was shut and bolted.

Maurice, wild with indignation, did not mend matters by seizing the

opportunity of a few minutes' solitude to write:--

'It was not Mabel

it was Maur

ice I mean Lord Hugh,'

because when that was seen Mabel was instantly sent to bed.

'It's not fair!' cried Maurice.

'My dear,' said Maurice's father, 'if that cat goes on mewing to this

extent you'll have to get rid of it.'

[Illustration: When Jane went in to put Mabel's light out Maurice crept

in too.]

Maurice said not another word. It was bad enough to be a cat, but to be

a cat that was 'got rid of'! He knew how people got rid of cats. In a

stricken silence he left the room and slunk up the stairs--he dared not

mew again, even at the door of Mabel's room. But when Jane went in to

put Mabel's light out Maurice crept in too, and in the dark tried with

stifled mews and purrs to explain to Mabel how sorry he was. Mabel

stroked him and he went to sleep, his last waking thought amazement at

the blindness that had once made him call her a silly little kid.

If you have ever been a cat you will understand something of what

Maurice endured during the dreadful days that followed. If you have not,

I can never make you understand fully. There was the affair of the

fishmonger's tray balanced on the wall by the back door--the delicious

curled-up whiting; Maurice knew as well as you do that one mustn't steal

fish out of other people's trays, but the cat that he was didn't know.

There was an inward struggle--and Maurice was beaten by the cat-nature.

Later he was beaten by the cook.

Then there was that very painful incident with the butcher's dog, the

flight across gardens, the safety of the plum tree gained only just in

time.

And, worst of all, despair took hold of him, for he saw that nothing he

could do would make any one say those simple words that would release

him. He had hoped that Mabel might at last be made to understand, but

the ink had failed him; she did not understand his subdued mewings, and

when he got the cardboard letters and made the same sentence with them

Mabel only thought it was that naughty boy who came through locked

windows. Somehow he could not spell before any one--his nerves were not

what they had been. His brain now gave him no new ideas. He felt that he

was really growing like a cat in his mind. His interest in his meals

grew beyond even what it had been when they were a schoolboy's meals. He

hunted mice with growing enthusiasm, though the loss of his whiskers to

measure narrow places with made hunting difficult.

He grew expert in bird-stalking, and often got quite near to a bird

before it flew away, laughing at him. But all the time, in his heart, he

was very, very miserable. And so the week went by.

Maurice in his cat shape dreaded more and more the time when Lord Hugh

in the boy shape should come back from Dr. Strongitharm's. He knew--who

better?--exactly the kind of things boys do to cats, and he trembled to

the end of his handsome half-Persian tail.

And then the boy came home from Dr. Strongitharm's, and at the first

sound of his boots in the hall Maurice in the cat's body fled with

silent haste to hide in the boot-cupboard.

Here, ten minutes later, the boy that had come back from Dr.

Strongitharm's found him.

Maurice fluffed up his tail and unsheathed his claws. Whatever this boy

was going to do to him Maurice meant to resist, and his resistance

should hurt the boy as much as possible. I am sorry to say Maurice swore

softly among the boots, but cat-swearing is not really wrong.

'Come out, you old duffer,' said Lord Hugh in the boy shape of Maurice.

'I'm not going to hurt you.'

'I'll see to that,' said Maurice, backing into the corner, all teeth and

claws.

'Oh, I've had such a time!' said Lord Hugh. 'It's no use, you know, old

chap; I can see where you are by your green eyes. My word, they do

shine. I've been caned and shut up in a dark room and given thousands of

lines to write out.'

'I've been beaten, too, if you come to that,' mewed Maurice. 'Besides

the butcher's dog.'

It was an intense relief to speak to some one who could understand his

mews.

'Well, I suppose it's Pax for the future,' said Lord Hugh; 'if you

won't come out, you won't. Please leave off being a cat and be Maurice

again.'

And instantly Maurice, amid a heap of goloshes and old tennis bats, felt

with a swelling heart that he was no longer a cat. No more of those

undignified four legs, those tiresome pointed ears, so difficult to

wash, that furry coat, that contemptible tail, and that terrible

inability to express all one's feelings in two words--'mew' and 'purr.'

He scrambled out of the cupboard, and the boots and goloshes fell off

him like spray off a bather.

He stood upright in those very chequered knickerbockers that were so

terrible when their knees held one vice-like, while things were tied to

one's tail. He was face to face with another boy, exactly like himself.

'_You_ haven't changed, then--but there can't be two Maurices.'

'There sha'n't be; not if I know it,' said the other boy; 'a boy's

life's a dog's life. Quick, before any one comes.'

'Quick what?' asked Maurice.

'Why tell me to leave off being a boy, and to be Lord Hugh Cecil again.'

Maurice told him at once. And at once the boy was gone, and there was

Lord Hugh in his own shape, purring politely, yet with a watchful eye

on Maurice's movements.

'Oh, you needn't be afraid, old chap. It's Pax right enough,' Maurice

murmured in the ear of Lord Hugh. And Lord Hugh, arching his back under

Maurice's stroking hand, replied with a purrrr-meaow that spoke volumes.

'Oh, Maurice, here you are. It _is_ nice of you to be nice to Lord Hugh,

when it was because of him you----'

'He's a good old chap,' said Maurice, carelessly. 'And you're not half a

bad old girl. See?'

Mabel almost wept for joy at this magnificent compliment, and Lord Hugh

himself took on a more happy and confident air.

Please dismiss any fears which you may entertain that after this Maurice

became a model boy. He didn't. But he was much nicer than before. The

conversation which he overheard when he was a cat makes him more patient

with his father and mother. And he is almost always nice to Mabel, for

he cannot forget all that she was to him when he wore the shape of Lord

Hugh. His father attributes all the improvement in his son's character

to that week at Dr. Strongitharm's--which, as you know, Maurice never

had. Lord Hugh's character is unchanged. Cats learn slowly and with

difficulty.

Only Maurice and Lord Hugh know the truth--Maurice has never told it to

any one except me, and Lord Hugh is a very reserved cat. He never at

any time had that free flow of mew which distinguished and endangered

the cat-hood of Maurice.