36 THE CAT ABOUT TOWN 



to roam. For at that hour all the dogs are shut up; 

 all the boys and grown-up people, too, are asleep. 

 There is not even a milkman about, or an amalga- 

 mated engineer going to his before-breakfast work. 

 The city is theirs. Their demeanour at this time is 

 absolutely changed. They stroll about the streets and 

 gardens with an air. They converse in the centre of 

 highways. They walk with a certain feline abandon 

 and momentary magnificence over gardens and squares. 

 For the time they are not cats, but lions and tigers ; 

 or, to change the simile, they are no longer domestics, 

 but gentlemen at large. Before sunrise one midsummer 

 morning the writer was watching the early birds by the 

 side of the London river, and wondering at the abund- 

 ance and variety of life in the silver-gray light of the 

 dawn. A pair of water-hens were running on the mud 

 left by the ebb, sedge-warblers singing, as they had 

 done all night, and a pair of turtle-doves flew down to 

 drink before sunrise. When the first beams of the sun 

 sent long shafts of light down the river, the sedge- 

 warblers were instantly silent ; and almost immediately 

 the blackbirds and sparrows and starlings appeared upon 

 the grass. At this moment another ornithologist ap- 

 peared upon the scene in the person of an elegant 

 young female cat. She made great efforts to stalk the 

 fat blackbirds and cock-sparrows, flattening herself till 

 her whole body seemed almost as level as a mat, yet 



