catching mice, just like her more plebeian sisters; and she enjoyed
presenting them to Mr. McGinty or me, or some other worthy object of her
solicitude.

She was at first afraid of "the big outdoors." The wide, wind-blown
spaces, the broad, sunshiny sky, the silence and the roominess of it
all, were quite different from her suburban experiences; and the farm
animals, too, were in her opinion curiously dangerous objects. Big Dan,
the horse, was truly a horrible creature; the rooster was a new and
suspicious species of biped, and the bleating calves objects of her
direst hatred.

The pig in his pen possessed for her the most horrid fascination. Again
and again would she steal out and place herself where she could see that
dreadful, strange, pink, fat creature inside his own quarters. She would
fix her round eyes widely upon him in blended fear and admiration. If
the pig uttered the characteristic grunt of his race, the Pretty Lady at
first ran swiftly away; but afterward she used to turn and gaze
anxiously at us, as if to say:--

"Do you hear that? Isn't this a truly horrible creature?" and in other
ways evince the same sort of surprise that a professor in the Peabody
Museum might, were the skeleton of the megatherium suddenly to accost
him after the manner peculiar to its kind.

It was funnier, even, to see Mr. McGinty on the morning after his
arrival at the farm, as he sallied forth and made acquaintance with
other of God's creatures than humans and cats, and the natural enemy of
his kind, the dog. In his suburban home he had caught rats and captured
on the sly many an English sparrow. When he first investigated his new