she? But you know I never take her seriously.' Then, with renewed precaution, she would return resolutely to her purpose, which was always to nestle up against her slumbering friend, and bury her head in that warm, soft, snowy fur. This accomplished, she would compose herself to sleep, with a final glance of triumph in my direction, which said drowsily, but distinctly, 'This is what I was after, and here I am.'"
Assuredly there was never a sweeter cat in Christendom than the beautiful Moumoutte Blanche.
Readers who seek to preserve as far as possible the gayety of life may be pardoned for wishing that M. Loti had spared them some of the pathetic details in which his soul delights. The few short years allotted to a cat are spent so swiftly that we who linger on our way are perpetually mourning some little vanished friend,—
"doubly dead,
In that she died so young."
It would be kinder not to awaken our buried grief, nor probe our wounds afresh; but he who wrote "Le Livre de la Pitié et de la Mort," has no compassion for our selfishness. Every step the two cats took to their graves is described with minute and haunting melancholy. The black dejection that seized poor Moumoutte Chinoise as her end drew near; her last sad impulse to die away from
