When the youth was seventeen—his name is Bonnetty—he introduced learned rabbits, hares, and guinea pigs, into the arena, so wonderfully trained that even the Dutch, who are not, as a rule, easy to move, were much astonished. However Bonnetty was not going to stop yet. Tempted by the great difficulty of the feat, he determined to prove that M. de Buffon was unjust to the cat, and with rare patience he devoted himself to the education of that animal. He chose two subjects, both Dutch, like himself, cats from Hooren—M. Bonnetty had remarked, after much [p128] observation, that the cats from that district are particularly docile—and he spent some months in training them; then one by one he added comrades to them, until he had twenty; the instinct of imitation assisted the later recruits to learn more rapidly. The first exercise consisted in making the cat jump at the word of command. “_Vooruit!_” cries M. Bonnetty, who speaks nothing but Dutch. The cat does not _vooruit_ all at once. It pauses undecided; very often it does not understand. But Bonnetty never loses patience. With a gentle hand, which resembles velvet in its touch, he softly caresses the cat’s spine, quite determined not to be angry, yet equally decided not to yield the point. At last the cat realizes what is required of it, and jumps. This first step gained, the after-work of education proceeds more quickly. The animal gets used to walking on the backs of chairs and the necks of bottles, or to leaping over flaming circles. But there is one decisive trial to pass through—that of appearing before the public. M. Bonnetty has had some cats, perfectly obedient in rehearsal, which could not be induced to perform to the sound of music before a crowd of spectators. They coiled themselves up in a corner of their little house, returning suddenly to a wild state. “I cannot treat them as I would dogs,” M. Bonnetty observed to me, “by interpreting my wishes through a whip. All violence is useless with them; I can only count upon what it pleases them to do; and my cats and I always treat each other with the utmost courtesy.” [p129] And in a moment of effusion his eyes suddenly filled with tears, and the cat-tamer related to me the story of an incomparable cat that he had lost in Brussels last May. [Illustration] “Ah! monsieur, he was a cat that I can never replace. He would leap over fourteen chairs with one bound, at more than a yard and a half high. “But you know what artists are: great children, all of them. On the very evening that we reached Brussels, I went to see my animals an hour before the performance. I found that Thommech had made his escape. The poor fellow was high on the tiles rushing after a Brussels cat that had turned his head. He tried to leap from one roof to another on the opposite side of the [p130] street. He fell, and when I picked him up from the pavement he was dying.