With all respect for Martha, I think that here she had mistaken her vocation. She should never have gone in for being a mother. The second kitten she lay down upon with fatal results. Then, being thoroughly disgusted with maternity, she went away and never was seen any more. She deserted the only child she had not killed; she deserted us who had tried so hard to give satisfaction; and in the basket there was left, still blind, still uncertain whether it was worth while to live at all, Puss-cat. Puss-cat was her mother’s own child from the first, though with much added. She wasted no time or strength in bewailing her orphaned condition, but took amazing quantities of milk administered on a feather. Her eyes opened, as eyes should do, on the seventh day, and she smiled at us all, and spat at Jill. So Jill licked her nose with anxious care, and said quite distinctly, “When you are a little older, I will be always ready to do whatever you like.” Jill says the same sort of thing to everybody except the dustman. Soon after, Puss-cat arose from her birth-bed and staggered across the pantry. Even this first expedition on her own feet was not made without purpose, for in spite of frequent falls she went straight up to a blind-tassel, and after looking at it for a long time, tested it with a tiny paw to make sure of it, thus showing, while scarcely out of the cradle, that serious purpose which marked her throughout her dear life. Her motto was, “Do your work,” and since she remained unmarried in spite of many very eligible offers, I think that her unnatural mother must have impressed upon her, in those few days before she deserted her, that the first duty of a cat is to look after the house, and that she herself didn’t think much of maternity. Puss-cat inherited also, I suppose, her fixed conviction that she ought to have been, even if she was not, the only cat in the world, and she would allow no one of her own race within eyeshot of house or garden. Some of her duties, though they were always conscientiously performed, I think rather bored her, but certainly she brought to the expulsion of cats an exquisite sense of enjoyment. On the appearance of any one of her own nation she would go hastily into ambush with twitching tail and jerking shoulder-blades, teasing and torturing herself with the postponement of that rapturous stealthy advance across the grass, if the quarry was looking the other way, or the furious hurling of herself through the air, if a frontal attack had to be delivered. And I often wondered that she did not betray her ambush by the rapture and sonorousness of her purring, as the supreme moment approached.