kitten always, being extremely small for her age; but time, I suppose, that spoils everything, will make her also a cat. You will see her, I hope, before that melancholy period shall arrive; for no wisdom that she may gain by experience will compensate her for the loss of her present hilarity."
What would the poet's pleasant winter evenings have been worth, if uncheered by such gay companionship?
With the waning of the eighteenth century and the dawn of its successor, the English cat assumes a more intimate place in letters. Never granted the tender and flattering preëminence of her French sister, she is in some sort recompensed by the tranquil domestic atmosphere, the fireside warmth and glow in which we see her play her gentle part. For a hundred years and more she had not wanted friends. In 1702 the Duchess of Richmond, that fair and lovable creature who had "less wit and more beauty" than any lady at court, bequeathed a maintenance to her old servants, her old cats, and to several old gentlewomen whom she had long befriended. It was this bounty that provoked from Pope the ever-quoted line,
"Die, and endow a college or a cat:"
but to most of us it would seem as though such gracious kindness merited a less satiric recogni-
