The next morning I was telling my husband what a nice little boy that was of Mrs. Burgess’s, and how fond he seemed to be of his mother, for he always came to see her every day just before my usual time of going down stairs to see about dinner, when Edward said that he saw what cat took the meat now; so he’d just take old mother Burgess unawares, and very soon show me whether our Tom was the thief or not. So when we went down to breakfast, dear Edward sent Mrs. Burgess out to get a pint of milk for him, and as soon as she had left the house he slipt down stairs and brought me up the basket that she came with upon her arm every morning, and which, he said, he had discovered stowed away in our copper in the back kitchen. Inside the basket we found nearly the whole of the beautiful beef-steak pie that we had scarcely touched for dinner the day before, and a bottle of pickles that had only been used once, and a bar of yellow soap and a bag of flour and two eggs wrapt up in one of our best glass cloths. Then putting them all back again, Edward hid the basket in the plate warmer under our sideboard; and when my lady came in with the milk, he told her that if she would be so good as to bring up the cold beef-steak pie and the pickles, that he thought he could take a mouthful of it, (no one but a man would ever have thought of such a thing.) Without saying a word, down goes the brazen-faced creature and up she comes with the dish in her hands, and scarcely a bit of the pie left in it. “Oh, mum,” she cries, without even so much as the shadow of a blush on her face, “only do just look here, mum! If that thief of a Tom hasn’t been and devoured all this beautiful pie of yours, and he must have knocked down the pickles, for there was eversomuch broken glass on the floor when I came in this morning. Oh, mum! really it is too bad. Upon my word, that cat is so cunning that I really shouldn’t wonder at anything he did next.” On which Edward very cleverly asked her whether she would wonder if, suppose the next thing Tom did was to put a whole beef-steak pie into her own basket, together with some pickles and some soap, and flour, and a glass cloth, and an egg or two, just to send home as a treat to his old friends her children. Then taking the basket from out of the plate warmer, he told her to look at it, adding, that he himself didn’t wonder _now_ at anything the cat had done since she had so kindly brought him to our house, and that really she ought to take care of the animal, for it was clear that Tom was as good as a fortune to her, and she could never want so long as she could get a situation for her cat in the same family as herself. Whereupon the impudent thing put her apron up to her eyes and pretended to cry, saying that she was a poor lone woman, with ten children, and it was a hard matter to find bread for so many mouths, (as if that was any affair of ours.) So Edward gave her the basket with all our things in it, like a stupid, and packed