"For the first time I looked attentively at the little visitor who for two weeks had shared my lodgings. She was tawny as a wild hare, and spotted like a leopard. Only her face and neck were white. Certainly an ugly and attenuated cat, yet perhaps her very ugliness had in it a piquancy which appealed to the discriminating mind. For one thing, she was so unlike the beautiful cats of France." (Alas! poor Moumoutte Blanche!) "Stealthy and sinuous, with great ears standing erect, and a preposterously long tail, she had nothing attractive save her eyes,—the deep, golden orange eyes of the Orient, unquiet, and wonderfully expressive.
"While I watched her, I carelessly laid my hand on her head, and stroked for the first time the yellow fur. It was not mere physical pleasure that she felt in the caress; but a consciousness of protection, of sympathy in her abandonment. It was for this she had crept from her hiding-place; it was for this, and not for food or drink, that she had come to beg, after so much wistful hesitation. Her little cat soul implored some company, some friendship in a lonely world.
"Where had she learned this need, poor outcast Pussy, never before touched by a kindly hand; never the object of affection, unless, indeed, the paternal junk held some forlorn Chinese child, as joyless, as famished, as friendless as herself;—a
