She was such a Pretty Lady, and gentle withal; so quiet and eminently
ladylike in her behavior, and yet dignified and haughtily reserved as a
duchess. Still it is better, under certain circumstances, to be a cat
than to be a duchess. And no duchess of the realm ever had more faithful
retainers or half so abject subjects.

Do not tell me that cats never love people; that only places have real
hold upon their affections. The Pretty Lady was contented wherever I,
her most humble slave, went with her. She migrated with me from
boarding-house to sea-shore cottage; then to regular housekeeping; up to
the mountains for a summer, and back home, a long day's journey on the
railway; and her attitude was always "Wheresoever thou goest I will go,
and thy people shall be my people."

I have known, and loved, and studied many cats, but my knowledge of her
alone would convince me that cats love people--in their dignified,
reserved way, and when they feel that their love is not wasted; that
they reason, and that they seldom act from impulse.

I do not remember that I was born with an inordinate fondness for cats;
or that I cried for them as an infant. I do not know, even, that my
childhood was marked by an overweening pride in them; this, perhaps, was
because my cruel parents established a decree, rigid and unbending as
the laws of the Medes and Persians, that we must never have more than
one cat at a time. Although this very law may argue that predilection,
at an early age, for harboring everything feline which came in my way,
which has since become at once a source of comfort and distraction.

After a succession of feline dynasties, the kings and queens of which
were handsome, ugly, sleek, forlorn, black, white, deaf, spotted, and