He was a battered old thing, too; very shabby and ailing, and seemed to have been very much knocked about in general. The skin of both his ears showed bare and furless where another cat had taken hold of him. His long mean tail was broken off sharp at the end, where it had been caught in a trap, out hunting for rabbits on the sly. And he had had an awful adventure once in France, where he had been taken by some English people and left on the farm which they hired for the summer. There some French child had had the bright idea of putting him on a smart collar of twisted rushes plaited up into a string. The child made it a little too big, not big enough for him to be able to get it off, but big enough for him to get his paw through and nearly his whole front-leg. He said he thought himself very clever to do this, but he bitterly regretted it, for he could not get the leg back and had to walk on three. Nobody on the French farm noticed it, and as it was they never fed him. French people never do feed dogs hardly, and cats never. They are not nice to animals. He says he never saw a dog or cat properly covered with flesh the whole time he was there; they were all wretched scrags. Well, the trouble with poor Charlie was that he couldn't catch any mice or birds to speak of, and he was nearly starving. He thought that he grew rather light-headed, for one day, in his extreme misery, he ran away into the woods and made up his mind to die. The place where his leg was pressing on his neck got sore--the collar rubbed it, I suppose--and he couldn't reach up to lick it, and so the paw got stuck to his body and began to fester, and caused him great pain. After about a week of starvation he happened to see a lady bathing in the river, who, when she had come out and dried herself, pulled a little bread and meat out of a napkin, and ate something and drank something on the edge of the stream. He went up to her, and she noticed him and called him, but he was too wild and shy to dare to go near her. He was ashamed of himself and the figure he cut. However, she left half her luncheon and rolled it out on the grass for him, and he came down from a sort of perch he had in a tree and ate it.