ing the dead kittens with pitying hands, and refusing to reinstate her into favour. The lesson was not lost. Another litter arrived in the course of time, and was endured with tolerable patience; a third awoke some languid interest in the maternal heart; and. she lived to rear a dozen families,—a solicitous, painstaking, but never affectionate parent.
The second criminal was a New England cat, and the motive for the crime was the same,—an aversion to the care of children, and an unwillingness to exchange the drawing-room rug for the kitchen fire. This mother deliberately carried out her kittens one by one, and dropped them in the water-butt; then returned to the house with a brow as calm as if her conscience were at rest, and no little dripping corpses could trouble her repose.
"She's ta'en the ribbons frae her hair,
And bound their bodies fast and sair.
She 's put them aneath a marble stane,
Thinking a maid to gae her hame."
But how rare these instances of depravity, and how perpetual the proofs of Pussy's maternal love! What terrors fill her anxious little heart, when—warned by bitter experience—she tries to hide her unwelcome family from human eyes. In attic, in cellar, in barn or stable, she tucks them out of sight, stealing to them with many pitiful precautions, lest
