The cat has her enthusiastic admirers, but as a friend of man she is ordinarily held in no great esteem. "Make much of the cat, and she will fly in your face." She is too commonly treacherous, selfish, and unreliable. We have more than once seen, and our experience cannot be unique, a cat fondled and stroked and made much of, suddenly savagely bite or scratch the hand that has been caressing it. Pussy as a follower of the chase has suggested the proverb, "The cat that is always crying catches nothing," and the better known saw, "A cat in mittens catches no mice." "Fain would the cat fish eat, but she's loath her feet to wet"; and in Chaucer's "House of Fame" we find an interesting reference to this-- "Ye be like the slepie cat That would have fish; but wost thou what? He will nothing weate his clawes." The "slepie cat," dormant on the hearth-rug, is, of course, like its confrères of the jungle, a nocturnal animal, and in the hours of darkness often becomes a little more wakeful than is altogether appreciated. As a songster of the night, instead of receiving merely barren compliments on its performance, it often gets the much more tangible reward of a boot, lump of coal, cake of soap, or such-like little token of appreciation as the auditor may find most readily come to hand. A very venerable proverb indeed tells us that "The ass and his master do not always think alike." Phædrus, living nearly nineteen hundred years ago, had a fable in his collection to illustrate this. He pictures to us a man resting by the road-side, and his ass grazing near him. The man, suddenly catching sight of an advancing enemy, says that they must at once decamp that they be not captured, whereupon the donkey asks, "Will they clap on me a double load?" and the man can only reply that he does not suppose that they will. "Then," said the donkey, "what matters it to me to whom I belong?"