take a morsel from the fingers with the finest politeness. Such a cat I have known, whose one weakness was a fondness for eggs. To get an egg she would adopt various ruses, a common one being to push aside with her paw the lid of the dish in which eggs are kept, lift an egg out with both paws, as a squirrel takes a nut, and drop it on the floor, whence she would lick it at her leisure. The sole prevention against a general inclination to thieve is to give the cat sufficient food.
"This is a green chicken."
But of all cat stories I know, the best is one told by Théophile Gautier, who has written concerning cats with an understanding and a feeling unsurpassed. He kept many cats, a chief favourite among which was "Madame Théophile," a "red" cat, with a white breast, a pink nose, and blue eyes. "She slept," says he, "at the foot of my bed; she sat on the arm of my chair while I wrote; she came down into the garden and gravely walked about with me; she was present at all my meals, and frequently intercepted a choice morsel on its way from my plate to my mouth. One day, a friend who was going away for a short time, brought me his parrot to be taken care of during his absence. The bird, finding itself in a strange place, climbed up to the top of its perch by the aid of its beak, and rolled its eyes (as yellow as the nails in my arm-chair) in a rather frightened manner, moving also the white membranes that formed its eyelids. 'Madame Théophile' had never seen a parrot before, and she regarded the creature with manifest surprise. While remaining as motionless as a cat-mummy from Egypt in its swathing-bands, she fixed her eyes upon the bird with a look of profound meditation, summoning up all the notions of natural history that she had picked up in the yard, in the garden, and on the roof. The shadow of her thoughts passed over her changing eyes, and one could plainly read in them the conclusion to which her scrutiny led:—'Certainly this is a green chicken.' This result attained, the next proceeding of 'Madame Théophile' was to jump off the table from which she had made her observations, and lay herself flat on the floor in a corner of the room, exactly in the attitude of a panther watching the gazelles as they come down to drink at a lake. The parrot followed the movements of the cat with feverish anxiety; it ruffled its feathers, rattled its chain, lifted one of its feet and shook the claws, and rubbed its beak against the edge of its trough. Instinct told it that the cat was an enemy, and meant mischief. The cat's eyes were now fixed upon the bird with fascinating intensity, and they said in perfectly intelligible language, which the poor parrot distinctly understood:—'This chicken should be good to eat, although it is green.' We watched the scene with great interest, ready to interfere at need. 'Madame Théophile' was creeping nearer and nearer, almost imperceptibly; her pink nose quivered, her eyes were half closed, her contractile claws moved in and out of their velvet sheaths, slight thrills of pleasure ran along her back-bone at the idea of the meal she was about to make. Such novel and exotic food excited her appetite. In an instant her back took the shape of a bent bow, and with a vigorous and elastic bound she sprang upon the perch.
"The parrot, seeing its danger, said in a
