and about the same time his cat kittened and the 

 young were despatched and buried. The hare was 

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

 fondlings, 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, and some- 

 thing gamboling after, which proved to be the lev- 

 eret that the cat had supported with her milk, and 

 continued 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 Feles, the Murium ieo, as Lin- 

 naeus 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 de- 

 rived to herself from the procuring her teats to be 

 drawn, which were too much distended with milk, 

 till, from habit, she became as much delighted with 

 this fondling 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 



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