or reading the prayers, to pat these small parishioners, and scratch them under their chins, or perhaps cuff them gently, if their vivacity prompted them to unseemly gambols. One envies the children of Morwenstow, who, alone perhaps of all the children in England, must have felt downright enjoyment in going to church.
More pleasant still, because more in keeping with the cat's natural instincts, which are domestic rather than devout, is this little picture drawn by Mr. William Rossetti from the recollections of his childhood, and told in the life of his brother, Dante Gabriel Rossetti.
"In all my earlier years I used frequently to see my father come home in the dusk, rather fagged with his round of teaching; and, after dining, he would lie down flat on the hearth-rug, close by the fire, snoring vigorously. Beside him would stand up our old familiar tabby cat, poised on her haunches, and holding on by her fore-claws inserted into the fender-wires, warming her furry front. Her attitude (I have never seen any feline imitation of it) was peculiar,—somewhat in the shape of a capital Y. 'The cat making the Y' was my father's phrase for this performance. She was the mother of a numerous progeny. One of her daughters—also long an inmate of our house—was a black and white cat named Zoë by my elder
