AFFECTION IN A CAT. 



rate computation she was allowed to have been 

 the fruitful parent of three hundred pigs ; a pro- 

 digious instance of fecundity in so large a qua- 

 druped! She was killed in spring, 1775. 



XXXIV. 



" Admorunt ubera tigres." 



WE have remarked in a former letter how 

 much incongruous animals, in a lonely state, may 

 be attached to each other from a spirit of sociality ; 

 in this it may not be amiss to recount a different 

 motive which has been known to create as strange 

 a fondness. 



My friend had a little helpless leveret brought 

 to him, which the servants fed with milk in a 

 spoon, and about the same time his cat kittened, 

 and the 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. However, in about a fortnight, as the 

 master was sitting in his garden in the dusk of 

 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, and something gamboling 

 after, which proved to be the leveret that the cat 

 had supported with her milk, and continued to 

 support with great affection. 1 



1 About two years since, at a cottar's house in Annan - 

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

 their mother ; 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. 



