Caricatures are in existence which represent us clothed in Turkish fashion, sitting cross-legged on cushions, and surrounded by cats, who are fearlessly climbing over our shoulders and even upon our head. Caricature is nothing more than the exaggeration of truth; and truth compels us to own that for animals in general, and for cats in particular, we have, all our lives long, had the tenderness of a Brahmin or of an old maid. The illustrious Byron carried a menagerie of pets about with him even when on his travels, and raised a tomb at Newstead Abbey to his faithful Newfoundland, “Boatswain,” which bears an epitaph of the poet’s own composition. But although we thus share his tastes, we must not be accused of plagiarism; for in our case the tendency manifested itself even before we had begun to learn the alphabet. We are told that a clever man is about to prepare a “History of Educated Animals;” so we offer him these notes, from which, so far as our animals are concerned, he will be able to extract reliable information. Our earliest recollections of this nature date back to our arrival in Paris from Tarbes. We were then precisely three years of age,—a fact which renders difficult of belief the statements of MM. de Mirecourt and Vapereau, who assert, that at that time we had already “received a bad education” in our native city. A homesickness of which one would hardly believe so young a child to be capable took possession of us. We could speak only in _patois_, and those who expressed themselves in French seemed to us like foreigners and aliens. In the middle of the night we would wake up and disconsolately ask if we might not soon be allowed to go back to our own country.