Conceyning Cats 



being disapproved of by the elders, the door was 

 kept carefully closed. She then found entrance 

 through a stove-pipe hole, high up on the wall of an 

 adjoining room. A cover was hung over the hole. 

 She sprang up and knocked it off. Then, as a last 

 resort, the hole was papered over like the wa.ll-paper 

 of the room. She looked, made a leap, and crashed 

 through the paper with as merry an air as a circus- 

 rider through his papered hoop. She had a habit 

 of manoeuvring to be shut out of doors at bed-time, 

 and then, when all was still, climbing up to my win- 

 dow by means of a porch over a door beneath it, to 

 pass the night on my bed. In some alterations of 

 the house, the porch was taken away. She looked 

 with dismay for a moment at the destruction of her 

 ladder, then calmly ran up the side of the house to 

 my window, which she always after continued to 

 do. 



"Next in importance, perhaps, is my present in- 

 timate companion, now ten years old and absolutely 

 deaf, so that we communicate with signs. If I want 

 to attract his attention I step on the floor : if to go 

 to his dinner, I show him a certain blue plate : to 

 call him in at night, I take a lantern outside the door, 

 and the flash of light attracts his attention from a 

 great distance. On one occasion he lived nine 

 months alone in the house while I made a trip to 

 Europe, absolutely refusing all the neighbors' invita- 

 tions to enter any other house. A friend's gardener 



86 



