When a piece of stale news or a long-winded, prosy article comes into the office, his remarkable sense of smell instantly detects it, and it is impossible to keep it from him. He always assists with great interest at the opening of the office mail, and he files several hundred letters a day in his interior department. The favorite diversion of the office-boys is to make him jump for twelve-column articles on the restoration of the American merchant marine. He takes a keen delight in hunting for essays on civil-service reform, and will play with them, if he has time, for hours. They are so pretty that he hates to kill them, but duty is duty. Clumsy and awkward English he springs at with indescribable quickness and ferocity; but he won’t eat it. He simply tears it up. He can’t stand everything. We don’t pretend he is perfect. We admit that he has an uncontrollable appetite for the _Congressional Record_. We have to keep this peculiar publication out of his reach. He will sit for hours and watch with burning eyes the iron safe in which we are obliged to shut up the _Record_ for safe-keeping. Once in a while we let him have a number or two. He becomes uneasy without it. It is his catnip. With the exception of this pardonable excess he is a blameless beast. He mouses out all the stupid stuff and nonsense that finds its way into the office and goes for it tooth and claw. He is the biggest copyholder in the world. And he never gets tired. His health is good, and we have not deemed it necessary to take out a policy on any one of his valuable lives. Many of our esteemed contemporaries are furnishing their offices with cats, but they can never hope to have the equal of the _Sun’s_ venerable polyphage. He is a cat of genius. The cat may have contracted his hatred of the dull and prosy from the men who worked in the _Sun_ office when Amos Cummings smiled and swore and got out the greatest four-page paper ever seen, singing the while the song of Walker’s filibusters: How would you like a soldier’s life On the plains of Nicara-goo? Marching away and fighting all day, Nothing to eat and as much to pay-- We do it all for glory, they say, On the plains of Nicara-goo. Not a bit of breakfast did I see, And dinner was all the same to me; Two fried cats and three fried rats Was a supper at Nicara-goo. Marching away and fighting all day, Nothing to eat and as much to pay-- We do it all for glory, they say, On the plains of Nicara-goo!