A FRIENDLY RAT 235 
her time running about and gathering little straws, 
feathers, string, and anything of the kind she 
could pick up, also stealing or begging for strips 
of cotton, or bits of wool and thread from the 
work - basket. Now it happened that her friend 
was one of those cats with huge tufts of soft hair 
on the two sides of her face; a cat of that type, 
which is not uncommon, has a quaint resemblance 
to a Mid-Victorian gentleman with a pair of mag- 
nificent side-whiskers of a silky softness covering 
both cheeks and flowing down like a double beard. 
The rat suddenly discovered that this hair was 
just what she wanted to add a cushion-like lining 
to her nest, so that her naked pink little ratlings 
should be born into the softest of all possible 
worlds. At once she started plucking out the 
hairs, and the cat, taking it for a new kind of 
game, but a little too rough to please her, tried 
for a while to keep her head out of reach and to 
throw the rat off. But she wouldn’t be thrown 
off, and as she persisted in flying back and jumping 
at the cat’s face and plucking the hairs, the cat 
quite lost her temper and administered a blow with 
her claws unsheathed. 
The rat fled to her refuge to lick her wounds, 
and was no doubt as much astonished at the 
sudden change in her friend’s disposition as the 
cat had been at the rat’s new way of showing her 
playfulness. The result was that when, after 
attending to her scratches, she started upon her 
task of gathering soft materials, she left the cat 
