feeds on discarded copy and anything else of a pseudo-literary nature
upon which it can pounce. In dull times it can subsist upon a meagre
diet of telegraphic brevities, police court paragraphs, and city
jottings; but when the universe is agog with news, it will exhibit the
insatiable appetite which is its chief distinguishing mark of difference
from the common _felis domestica_. A single member of this family
has been known, on a 'rush' night, to devour three and a half columns of
presidential possibilities, seven columns of general politics, pretty
much all but the head of a large and able-bodied railroad accident, and
a full page of miscellaneous news, and then claw the nether garments of
the managing editor, and call attention to an appetite still in good
working order.

"The progenitrix of the family arrived in the _Sun_ office many
years ago, and installed herself in a comfortable corner, and within a
few short months she had noticeably raised the literary tone of the
paper, as well as a large and vociferous family of kittens. These
kittens were weaned on reports from country correspondents, and the
sight of the six children and the mother cat sitting in a semicircle was
one which attracted visitors from all parts of the nation. Just before
her death--immediately before, in fact--the mother cat developed a
literary taste of her own and drank the contents of an ink-bottle. She
was buried with literary honors, and one of her progeny was advanced to
the duties and honors of office cat. From this time the line came down,
each cat taking the 'laurel greener from the brows of him that uttered
nothing base,' upon the death of his predecessor. There is but one blot
upon the escutcheon of the family, put there by a recent incumbent who
developed a mania at once cannibalistic and infanticidal, and set about
making a free lunch of her offspring, in direct violation of the Raines
law and the maternal instinct. She died of an overdose of chloroform,