made useful in a kitchen. Besides clearing the domestic precincts of the cheese-nibbling folk, it would not be above catching the crickets on the hearth or the humble cockroach — and eating them. The lion in a wild state never disdains such small deer as insects. But whether our modern cooks and kitchen maids would care to have a promiscuous lion downstairs is another matter, and the doubt on this point suggests a very painful contrast between the manners of the larger and the lesser cats.
The lesser cat, it is only too true, is often so carried away by her feelings as to indulge in the surreptitious canary; and she has been known to forget herself so far during the night-watches as to skirmish on the windowsill, in the company of the cat from next door, with such vivacity and want of judgment as to upset flowerpots into the back-yard. The gravity of these misdemeanors cannot be slurred over, but, after all, to what do they amount compared to the havoc that would result from the domestication of some of the larger cats — such as lions?
Confessing his sins in a parliament of the beasts, the lion in the fable says: “J’ai dévoré force moutons; meme il m’est arrive quelquefois de manger le berger!” and from a shepherd to a cook is only a brief step. But between a canary and a cook there is a distance of many parasangs, and the enormity of the one offence is barely comparable to that of the other. Again, the light-hearted cat, when foregathering for frivolous converse with her kind, does damage, as has been said, to occasional flower-pots, and has even in her gayety been known to fall ruinously through the kitchen window. But supposing we tried to keep lions about the place,
