ward, evidently desired to share. Although it was apparent that the taste of the crab was not agreeable to Jemmy's palate, yet he gradually ate him up, claws, shells, and all, simply to prevent the other animals from getting a single bit.
The cat's-meat man comes punctually every day at half-past one; when the cats hear the cry "meat," they rush down into the area, and Master Jemmy, seeing them bolt, would run also, his object being to steal the ration of meat from one of the cats. By instinct or experience he had somehow found out that the cat's claws are very sharp, and whereas his mode of attack upon the monkey was face to face, the monkeys being clawless, he attacked the cats by ruffing his hair up and pushing himself backward.
The cat, annoyed by being disturbed at dinner, would leave off eating and strike sharply at Jemmy with her paw; that was his opportunity. In a moment he would seize the cat's-meat and bolt with it, but by a most peculiar method, for when within striking distance of the cat's paw he would turn round and back up to the cat's face, and, directly she struck at him, he caught the blow on the back, then he would put his nose down through his forelegs, and through the hinder ones, and have the meat in a moment, leaving the cat wondering where it was gone. Jemmy had by this time taken it into a place of safety. Under the table in Mr. Searle's office there is just room for him to crawl; here the angry cat could not of course follow him. In this retreat he would finish up what he had stolen, and then emerge, licking his lips, and probably laughing to himself at the disappointed face of the cat. Jemmy was always fond of getting under anything or in any kind of hole, and his great delight was to get into a boot, and when he got to the end scratching it as though he wanted to get farther into the burrow. Frequently I found my boots going round the room, propelled, apparently, by some internal machinery. This machinery was Master Jemmy.
Jemmy was a greedy little fellow. John could not bring up any kind of food into my room without Jemmy. He would watch the cook broiling the chop down stairs, and when John brought it up would follow close to his heels, and what between Jemmy's pretty, begging manner, the monkey's plaintive cries, and the parrot's demand, it often happens that I get very little of the chop.
I had hoped to have written a fuller biography of our poor little Jemmy the Third, but alas! on Sunday last Jemmy was taken with a fit. I did everything I could to relieve the poor little fellow, but the fits were too much for him, and Mr. Searle and myself have been busily occupied in making his skin into a mat and his bones into a skeleton. The last Jemmy died of eating cotton-wool; this Jemmy died, I think, of eating too much, for he was as fat as a little bacon-pig, and weighed two pounds—a great weight for such a little animal. It is curious how fond I become of dear little animals
