(BY PERMISSION.)
|I AM not fond of cats, as a general rule. I never yearned to have one
around the house. My idea always was, that I could have trouble enough
in a legitimate way without adding a cat to my woes. With a belligerent
cook and a communistic laundress, it seems to me most anybody ought to
be unhappy enough without a cat.
I never owned one until a tramp cat came to our house one day during the
present autumn, and tearfully asked to be loved. He didn't have anything
in his make-up that was calculated to win anybody's love, but he seemed
contented with a little affection,--one ear was gone and his tail was
bald for six inches at the end, and he was otherwise well calculated to
win confidence and sympathy. Though we could not be madly in love with
him, we decided to be friends, and give him a chance to win the general
respect.
Everything would have turned out all right if the bobtail waif had not
been a little given to investigation. He wanted to know more about the
great world in which he lived, so he began by inspecting my house. He
got into the store-room closet and found a place where the carpenter had
not completed his job. This is a feature of the Laramie artisan's style.
He leaves little places in unobserved corners generally, so that he can
come back some day and finish it at an additional cost of fifty dollars.
This cat observed that he could enter at this point and go all over the
imposing structure between the flooring and the ceiling. He proceeded to
do so.
*****
We will now suppose that a period of two days has passed. The wide halls
and spacious façades of the Nye mansion are still. The lights in the
banquet-hall are extinguished, and the ice-cream freezer is hushed to
rest in the wood-sned. A soft and tearful yowl, deepened into a regular
ring-tail-peeler, splits the solemn night in twain. Nobody seemed to
know where it came from.
I rose softly and went to where the sound had seemed to well up from. It
was not there.
I stood on a piece of cracker in the diningroom a moment, waiting for it
to come again. This time it came from the boudoir of our French artist
in soup-bone symphonies and pie--Mademoiselle Bridget O'Dooley. I went
there and opened the door softly, so as to let the cat out without
disturbing the giant mind-that had worn itself out during the day in the
kitchen, bestowing a dry shampoo to the china.
Then I changed my mind and came out. Several articles of vertu, beside
Bridget, followed me with some degree of vigor.
The next time the tramp cat yowled he seemed to be in the recesses of
the bath-room. I went down stairs and investigated. In doing so I
drove my superior toe into my foot, out of sight, with a door that I
encountered. My wife joined me in the search. She could not do much, but
she aided me a thousand times by her counsel. If it had not been for
her mature advice I might have lost much of the invigorating exercise of
that memorable night.
Toward morning we discovered that the cat was between the floor of the
children's play-room and the ceiling of the dining-room. We tried till
daylight to persuade the cat to come out and get acquainted, but he
would not.
At last we decided that the quickest way to get the poor little thing
out was to let him die in there, and then we could tear up that portion
of the house and get him out. While he lived we couldn't keep him still
long enough to tear a hole in the house and get at him.
It was a little unpleasant for a day or two waiting for death to come
to his relief, for he seemed to die hard, but at last the unearthly
midnight yowl was still. The plaintive little voice ceased to vibrate on
the still and pulseless air. Later, we found, however, that he was not
dead. In a lucid interval he had discovered the hole in the store-room
where he entered, and, as we found afterward a gallon of coal-oil
spilled in a barrel of cut loaf-sugar, we concluded that he had escaped
by that route.
That was the only time that I ever kept a cat, and I didn't do it then
because I was suffering for something to fondle. I've got a good deal
of surplus affection, I know, but I don't have to spread it out over a
stump-tail orphan cat.