"The Westminster Cat Exhibition, which will be held in the Royal Horticultural Society's Hall, Vincent Square, Westminster, on January 10 and 11, will afford an opportunity to all who love the domestic cat to aid in improving its lot through the agency of Our Dumb Friends' League, which it is desired to benefit, not only by their presence on the occasion, but by contributing suitable specimens to the 'Gift Class' which will form part of the show, and be offered for sale in aid of the League during the time the exhibition is open. Children will be invited, for the first time, to enter into the competition with their pets for suitable prizes, and thus, it is hoped, increase their interest in and affection for domestic pets." Here I felt myself on more familiar ground. For I, too, have been young. I have trafficked in squirrels and guinea-pigs, have invested my all in an Angora rabbit, and have undergone discipline for bringing a dormouse into school. These are, indeed, among the childish things which I put away when I became a Fifth Form boy; but their memory is sweet--sweeter, indeed, than was their actual presence. For the Cat, with which my friend seems chiefly to concern himself, I have never felt, or even professed, any warm regard. I leave her to Dick Whittington and Shakespeare, who did so much to popularize her; to Gray and Matthew Arnold and "C. S. C.," who have drawn her more sinister traits. Gray remarks, with reference to "the pensive Selima" and her hopeless struggles in the tub of goldfish, that "a favourite has no friend." Archbishop Benson rendered the line "Delicias dominæ cetera turba fugit." I join the unfriendly throng, and pass to other themes. The pet-keeping instinct, strong in infancy but suppressed by the iron traditions of the Public School, not seldom reasserts itself in the freedom of later life. "The Pets of History" would be a worthy theme for a Romanes Lecture at Oxford; and, if the purview were expanded so as to include the Pets of Literature, it would be a fit subject for the brilliant pen of Mr. Frederic Harrison. We might conveniently adopt a Wordsworthian classification, such as "Pets belonging to the period of Childhood," "Juvenile Pets," "Pets and the Affections," "Pets of the Fancy," and "Pets of the Imagination." In the last-named class a prominent place would be assigned to Heavenly Una's milk-white lamb and to Mary's snowy-fleeced follower. "Pets of the Fancy" has, I must confess, something of a pugilistic sound, but it might fairly be held to include the tame eagle which Louis Napoleon, when resident in Carlton Gardens, used to practise in the basement for the part which it was to play in his descent on Boulogne. Under "Pets and the Affections" we should recall Chaucer's "Prioresse"-- "Of smale houndes hadde sche, that sche fedde With rostud fleissh, and mylk, and wastel bredde."