240 AFFECTION IN A CAT. 



young were dispatched and buried. The hare was 

 soon lost, and supposed to be gone the way of most 

 foundlings, to be killed by some dog or cat. How- 

 ever, in about a fortnight, as the master was sitting 

 in his garden, in the dusk of the evening, he observed 

 his cat, with tail erect, trotting towards him, and 

 calling with little short inward notes of complacency, 

 such as they use towards their kittens, arid some- 

 thing gamboling after, which proved to be the leveret 

 that the cat had supported with her milk, and conti- 

 nued to support with great affection*. 



Thus was a graminivorous animal nurtured by a 

 carnivorous and predaceous one ! 



Why so cruel and sanguinary a beast as a cat, of 

 the ferocious genus of fells y the murium leo, " the 

 lion of mice/' as Linnseus calls it, should be affected 

 with any tenderness towards an animal which is its 

 natural prey, is not so easy to determine. 



This strange affection probably was occasioned by 

 that desiderium, those tender maternal feelings, which 

 the loss of her kittens had awakened in her breast ; 

 and by the complacency and ease she derived to her- 

 self from procuring her teats to be drawn, which were 

 too much distended with milk ; till, from habit, she 

 became as much delighted with this foundling, as if 

 it had been her real offspring. 



This incident is no bad solution of that strange 

 circumstance which grave historians, as well as the 

 poets, assert, of exposed children being sometimes 

 nurtured by female wild beasts that probably had 

 lost their young. For it is not one whit more mar- 



* About two years since, at a cottar's house in Annandale, 

 Dumfries-shire, a litter of pigs by some accident lost their mo- 

 ther ; at the same time, a pointer bitch happening to pup, and 

 the puppies suffering the lot common to most such, their place 

 was supplied by the pigs, which were well and affectionately 

 nursed by their foster-parent. W. J. 1829. 



