The Pretty Lady was contented wherever I,
her most humble slave, went with her. She migrated with me from
boarding-house to sea-shore cottage; then to regular housekeeping; up to
the mountains for a summer, and back home, a long day's journey on the
railway; and her attitude was always "Wheresoever thou goest I will go,
and thy people shall be my people."
I have known, and loved, and studied many cats, but my knowledge of her
alone would convince me that cats love people--in their dignified,
reserved way, and when they feel that their love is not wasted; that
they reason, and that they seldom act from impulse.
I do not remember that I was born with an inordinate fondness for cats;
or that I cried for them as an infant. I do not know, even, that my
childhood was marked by an overweening pride in them; this, perhaps, was
because my cruel parents established a decree, rigid and unbending as
the laws of the Medes and Persians, that we must never have more than
one cat at a time. Although this very law may argue that predilection,
at an early age, for harboring everything feline which came in my way,
which has since become at once a source of comfort and distraction.
After a succession of feline dynasties, the kings and queens of which
were handsome, ugly, sleek, forlorn, black, white, deaf, spotted, and
otherwise marked, I remember fastening my affections securely upon one
kitten who grew up to be the ugliest, gauntest, and dingiest specimen I
ever have seen.
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