brush, no shoes to provide, no socks to knit and mend, no
school-books to buy, and no nurse! Think of a living being with the
love of offspring in her bosom, and a multitude of marvellous
instincts in her nature, yet knowing nothing of God, thinking not
of the future, without a hope or an expectation, or a doubt or a
fear, passing straight on to annihilation! At the threshold of this
destiny the little kittens were carelessly playing; and they are
doubtless still playing, while I write. They have no lessons to
learn, they do not have to go to Sunday-school, they entertain no
prejudices, except against dogs which occasionally dodge into the
yard; and I judge, by the familiar way in which they play with
their mother's ears, and pounce upon her tail, that they are not
in any degree oppressed by a sense of the respect due to a parent.
Cat and kittens will eat, and frolic, and sleep, through their
brief life, and then they will curl up in some dark corner and
die.

I remember that in one of the late Mr. Joseph C. Neal's "Charcoal
Sketches," he puts into the mouth of a very sad and seedy loafer
the expression of a wish that he were a pig, and a statement of
the reasons for the wish. These reasons, as I recall them, related
to the freedom of the pig from the peculiar trials and troubles of
humanity. Pigs do not have to work for a living; they undertake no
enterprizes, and of course fail in none; they eat and sleep
through a period of months, and then come the knife and a grunt,
and that is the last of them. Now I suppose this thought of Mr.
Neal's loafer has been shared by millions of men. Not that
everybody has at some time in his life wished he were a pig, but
that nearly everybody who has had his share of the troubles and
responsibilities of life, has looked upon simple animal