This was too much. I crept round the corner to give her a cuff. She wasn't there! I came back, and there she was as brazen as ever. I tried this game on several times, but couldn't catch her. "Then," says I, "you'll have it where you stand, and hang the pane of glass!" I struck straight from the shoulder, and with a will too. Down went the glass, and I found I had been fighting all the time with my own shadow. Funny, wasn't it? When mistress came home there was such a row. But she was sensible, and didn't beat me. She took me upstairs, and showed me what I had done, and looked so vexed that I was sorry too. "It is my own fault, though," she said; "I ought to have shut the door." She presented me with a looking-glass soon after this, and it is quite surprising how my opinion of that strange kitten in the mirror altered after that. I thought now I had never seen such a lovely thing, and I was never tired looking at it. No more I had. But first impressions _are_ so erroneous, you know. My dear mother is dead and gone years ago--of course, considering my age, you won't marvel at that; and my young mistress is married long, long ago, and has a grown family, who are all as kind as kind can be to old Tom, as they facetiously call me. And so they were to my mother, who, I may tell you, was only three days in her last illness, and gave up the ghost on a file of old newspapers (than which nothing makes a better bed) and is buried under the old pear-tree. Dear me, how often I have wondered how other poor cats who have neither kind master nor mistress manage to live. But, the poor creatures, they are _so_ ignorant--badly-bred, you know. Why, only the other day the young master brought home a poor little cat, he had found starving in the street. Well, I never in all my life saw such an ill-mannered, rude little wretch, for no sooner had it got itself stuffed with the best fare in the house, than it made a deliberate attempt to steal the canary. There was gratitude for you! Now, mind, I don't say that _I_ shouldn't like to eat the canary, but I never have taken our own birds-- no--always the neighbours'. I did, just once, fly at our own canary's cage when I was quite a wee cat, and didn't know any better. And what do you think my mistress did? Why, she took the bird out of the cage and popped me in; and there I was, all day long, a prisoner, with nothing for dinner but seeds and water, and the canary flying about the room and doing what it liked, even helping itself to my milk. I never forgot that.