again, of cats that will go out for a walk with a human
fellow-creature, as dogs do. I have frequently seen a lady walking
across Hampstead Heath with a cat in train. When you go for a walk
with a dog, however, the dog protects you: when you go for a walk with
a cat, you feel that you are protecting the cat. It is strange that
the cat should have imposed the myth of its helplessness on us. It is
an animal with an almost boundless capacity for self-help. It can jump
up walls. It can climb trees. It can run, as the proverb says, like
"greased lightning." It is armed like an African chief. Yet it has
contrived to make itself a pampered pet, so that we are alarmed if it
attempts to follow us out of the gate into a world of dogs, and only
feel happy when it is purring--rolling on its back and purring as we
rub its Adam's apple--by the fireside. There is nothing that gives a
greater sense of comfort than the purring of a cat. It is the most
flattering music in nature. One feels, as one listens, like a humble
lover in a bad novel, who says: "You do, then, like me--a
little--after all?" The fact that a cat is not utterly miserable in
our presence always comes with the freshness and delight of a
surprise. The happiness of a crowing baby, newly introduced to us, may
be still more flattering, but a cat will get round people who cannot
tolerate babies.

It is all the more to be wondered at that a cat, which is such a
master of this conversational sort of music, should ever attempt any
other. There never was an animal less fit to be a singer. Someone--was
it Cowper?---has said that there are no really ugly voices in nature,
and that he could imagine that there was something to be said even for
the donkey's bray. I should have thought that the beautiful voices in
nature were few, and that most of them could be defended only on the
ground of some pleasant association. Humanity, at least, has been