angle of the garden wall, so that it should be entirely off her premises, the collector’s position would be greatly aggravated; for what more could a person do than this to prove that there was no conspiracy in the matter, no attempt at fraudulent evasion of a legal demand? It is true that, if she were of a nimble kind, the landlady might prosecute her chase even farther, and not desist until she had seen pussy fairly out of the ward; but it surely has not come to this, in a free country too, that elderly ladies must satisfy tax-collectors by such violent exercise, to the detriment of their domestic and other duties; or, because a minion of the law insists upon it that wherever a cat is to be found there it is to be taxed, that females of all ages, delicately nurtured it may be, or otherwise incapacitated from rapid pursuit of animals, are to be set running about the streets and climbing trees, in order to rid themselves of importunate cats! The idea is preposterous.
Here, indeed, I have touched the very heart of the difficulty, for a cat does not of necessity belong to the place where she is found. Cats, in fact, belong to nowhere in particular. They are called domestic, I know, but they are really not so at all. They come inside houses for warmth, and because saucers with milk in them are more often found in houses than on garden walls, or in the roads, or up in trees; because street boys do not go about throwing stones in houses, and because there are no idle dogs there, looking round corners for something to hunt.
Besides, when it rains it is dry inside a house, as compared with out of doors, and sleep can be more comfortably arrived at in the daytime under a kitchen dresser than in such exposed and draughty spots as the
