The city of Cheyenne, Wyoming, recently experienced a peculiar and singularly sharp affliction in the insanity of all its cats. Cheyenne cats had theretofore been regarded as the most level-headed and least mercurial of their species. Nothing in their aspect nor demeanor had been observed to justify a suspicion that they suffered from uncommonness of mind; then they developed symptoms of such pronounced intellectual independence that even the local physicians, inured to all phases and degrees of eccentricity in the human contingent of Cheyenne’s population, were unable to ignore the melancholy significance of the phenomena—the cats of Cheyenne were indubitably as mad as hatters. To him who has duly considered the cat’s place in the scheme of modern civilization, the actual calamity will suggest possibilities of the most dismal and gruesome sort. In imagination he will see (and hear) the mental epidemic spreading by contagion until it affects the cats of the whole world, and perhaps those of Denver. The musical outlook is discouraging: the orchestration of a feline lunatic in one of its deuced intervals can be nothing less than appalling! Fancy a maniacal male of the species, beneath his favorite window of the dormitory of a hospital for nervous insomnia, securely casemented in an empty crate and courting rather than avoiding the assaults of the wild bootjacquerie above, while twanging his disordered fiddle-strings for the production of a long unmeasured tone To mortal minstrelsy unknown, and then executing such variants of his theme as no rational cat has ever been able or willing to compose!