but only calls out to somebody else inside, “Here’s a cat on the steps, a-mewing like anything.” The adventurer, meanwhile, has got up and, still mewing, rubs herself suggestively on the post, arching up her back and leaning very much on one side — to show, no doubt, that she has no other visible means of support. The kitchen-maid duly reports the cat’s proceedings, and some original-minded domestic at once hazards the suggestion that “the poor thing has lost hisself.” This bold hypothesis is at once accepted as satisfying all the conditions of the problem, and ultimately, from one guileful gesture to another, the cat is found at last rubbing herself — still very much out of the perpendicular and still mewing — against the cook’s skirts in front of the kitchen fire.
A cat has as keen an instinct for a cook as a policeman has, and makes straight for her. A strange dog, they say, will find out the master of a house at once, and immediately attach itself to him. The cat, however, does not trouble herself about such superficial differences of position as these, but goes without hesitation to the great dispenser of creature comforts, the cook. Masters, she says, are untrustworthy; they come and go, and in some houses do not even exist at all; but the kitchen fire is a fixed star, and the cook a satellite that may always be depended upon to be found revolving in her proper orbit. She attaches herself, therefore, to this important domestic at once, and forthwith becomes our cat.
Yet she is only our cat as distinguished from the cat next door. In no other sense is she ours at all. The chances are that the master of the house does not even know that there is such an animal on the establishment. Upon one occasion, certainly, he remembers
