be as far removed from an impossible standard of perfection.
One feline Sybarite took an unworthy advantage of Mr. Carlyle's absence to kitten on his bed; and another stole the red herring which the maid-of-all-work had cooked for her own dinner. There was at no time a superfluity of good cheer beneath that meagre roof, and who, save the aggrieved maid, could have censured so natural and necessary a theft? This hapless cat was afterwards—while its mistress was away—ruthlessly drowned, "for unexampled dishonesty," being expected, apparently, to live upon nothing but mice.
The next incumbent was a vivacious black pussy, known by the pretty name of Columbine. There is an amusing letter from Mrs. Carlyle,—when is she not amusing!—in which Nero, the little dog, gives his absent master a graphic picture of the unhomelike home, with its Spartan rigours, and bleak, clean, fussy discomfort. He winds up ruefully: "There was no dinner yesterday, to speak of. I had, for my share, only a piece of biscuit that might have been round the world; and if Columbine got anything at all, I did n't see it."
Possibly Columbine foraged for herself, after the free-booting fashion of her race; but the white cat that succeeded her departed immediately from such dinnerless quarters. Then Mr. Darwin offered
