'That's poetry, even if it isn't grammar,' said the thing that looked like Maurice. 'Why, my good cat, don't you see that if you are I, I must be you? Otherwise we should interfere with time and space, upset the balance of power, and as likely as not destroy the solar system. Oh, yes--I'm you, right enough, and shall be, till some one tells you to change from Lord Hugh into Maurice. And now you've got to find some one to do it.' ('Maurice!' thundered the voice of Mr. Basingstoke.) 'That'll be easy enough,' said Maurice. 'Think so?' said the other. 'But I sha'n't try yet. I want to have some fun first. I shall catch heaps of mice!' 'Think so? You forget that your whiskers are cut off--Maurice cut them. Without whiskers, how can you judge of the width of the places you go through? Take care you don't get stuck in a hole that you can't get out of or go in through, my good cat.' 'Don't call me a cat,' said Maurice, and felt that his tail was growing thick and angry. 'You _are_ a cat, you know--and that little bit of temper that I see in your tail reminds me----' Maurice felt himself gripped round the middle, abruptly lifted, and carried swiftly through the air. The quickness of the movement made him giddy. The light went so quickly past him that it might as well have been darkness. He saw nothing, felt nothing, except a sort of long sea-sickness, and then suddenly he was not being moved. He could see now. He could feel. He was being held tight in a sort of vice--a vice covered with chequered cloth. It looked like the pattern, very much exaggerated, of his school knickerbockers. It _was_. He was being held between the hard, relentless knees of that creature that had once been Lord Hugh, and to whose tail he had tied a sardine-tin. Now _he_ was Lord Hugh, and something was being tied to _his_ tail. Something mysterious, terrible. Very well, he would show that he was not afraid of anything that could be attached to tails. The string rubbed his fur the wrong way--it was that that annoyed him, not the string itself; and as for what was at the end of the string, what _could_ that matter to any sensible cat? Maurice was quite decided that he was--and would keep on being--a sensible cat. The string, however, and the uncomfortable, tight position between those chequered knees--something or other was getting on his nerves. 'Maurice!' shouted his father below, and the be-catted Maurice bounded between the knees of the creature that wore his clothes and his looks. 'Coming, father,' this thing called, and sped away, leaving Maurice on the servant's bed--under which Lord Hugh had taken refuge, with his tin-can, so short and yet so long a time ago. The stairs re-echoed to the loud boots which Maurice had never before thought loud; he had often, indeed, wondered that any one could object to them. He wondered now no longer.