Cats make good husbands, gentle fathers, and the most tender and loving of mothers. A cat will fight for her kittens, starve or _steal_ for them. Oh! I daresay you imagine that stealing wouldn't be likely to lie very heavily on a cat's conscience. Now listen to this--which the printer will kindly put in italics--_all experience goes to prove that well-fed, properly cared-for cats, are not thieves, but the reverse_. Cats have their kittens in queer places, at times. A lady's best Sunday bonnet, or master's wig, or a set of ermine furs, just suits pussy to a nicety. My cat once kittened in my cocked hat. It is a positive fact, madam, and so far from thinking she had done anything to offend me, she held up one of her brats for me to admire. But the queerest place for a cat to kitten in, that ever I knew, was a tree. The cat scrambled up the tree and brought forth her young in the nest of a wood-pigeon! I didn't hear how the kittens got down again though, but I have every reason to believe the story. Probably, when the kittens opened their eyes they commenced playing with their mother's tail, and went topsy-turvy to the ground. Well, _facilis descensus Averni_, and you know cats always fall on their feet. I knew a man who kicked his own cat out of his pigeon loft, three storeys high. He told me it didn't seem to hurt her a bit, but rather increased her appetite. Whether cats have nine lives or not, they take a great deal of killing. I knew a cat that was drowned four times, and came home again as unconcernedly as if nothing very unusual had happened. However, drowning in the end seemed to get rather irksome to this pussy, and after the fourth immersion, he ran away to the woods, and didn't come back to be drowned any more. Many cases I know of parties having started off with puss in a bag to drown her, and having stopped to talk to a friend on the way back found, on their return, the cat sitting by the fire drying herself! I have many instances of cats having been thrown from bridges and other high places, with the intention of killing them, but without fatal effect. Cats have been buried alive for days and recovered after being dug up. A cat of my acquaintance was sent to live at a mill. This seemed to please pussy very much. You see there were plenty of mice in the mill, and plenty of rats and fish in the mill-lead, so the cat made herself at home. But in course of time pussy became the mother of two kittens, and then the longing for her old home came back with a force too powerful to be resisted. She determined, therefore, to return to her former residence, and she did so, carrying her kittens one by one. The distance she had to travel was two miles, and the night she chose was a dark and stormy one.