little waif who sought shelter by her comfortable hearth.
"A very pretty cat intruded herself on us this evening. We did not make her welcome at first, but she seemed to insist on staying. Sally then gave her milk, and very soon after she caught a poor little mouse; and she is now lying on the corner of my apron by ye fireside, as familiarly as if she had lived with us for seven years."
It is pleasant to hear the kind-hearted Quakeress say "poor little mouse;" for the unconcern with which most of us view the death agony of a mouse contrasts strangely with our sentimental outpourings over a murdered bird. The mouse might say with Shylock, "If you prick us, do we not bleed?"—and feel with Shylock that no one heeds the shedding of such blood. But, for the slaughter of a bird, there is a different cry. Does not even that sweet saint, Eugénie de Guérin, bewail in no gentle words—in the most ungentle words her journal holds—such a calamity?
"I am furious with the grey cat. The wicked creature has just robbed me of a young pigeon that I was warming by the fire. The poor little thing was beginning to revive; I had meant to tame it; it would have grown fond of me; and now all this ends in its getting crunched up by a cat. What disappointments there are in life!"
