thirty-three years old.

Although in other days a great many noted men have been devoted to cats,
I do not find that our men of letters to-day know so much about cats.
Mr. William Dean Howells says: "I never had a cat, pet or otherwise. I
like them, but know nothing of them." Judge Robert Grant says, "My
feelings toward cats are kindly and considerate, but not ardent."

Thomas Bailey Aldrich says, "The only cat I ever had any experience with
was the one I translated from the French of Emile de La Bedollierre many
years ago for the entertainment of my children." [Footnote: "Mother
Michel's Cat."] Brander Matthews loves them not. George W. Cable answers,
when asked if he loves the "harmless, necessary cat," by the Yankee method,
and says, "If you had three or four acres of beautiful woods in which were
little red squirrels and chipmunks and fifty or more kinds of nesting
birds, and every abutting neighbor kept a cat, and none of them kept their
cat out of those woods--_would you like cats?_" which is, indeed,
something of a poser.

Colonel Thomas W. Higginson, however, confesses to a great fondness for
cats, although he has had no remarkable cats of his own. He tells a
story told him by an old sailor at Pigeon Cove, Mass., of a cat which
he, the sailor, tried in vain to get rid of. After trying several
methods he finally put the cat in a bag, walked a mile to Lane's Cove,
tied the cat to a big stone with a firm sailor's knot, took it out in a
dory some distance from the shore, and dropped the cat overboard. Then
he went back home to find the cat purring on the doorstep.

Those who are familiar with Charles Dudley Warner's "My Summer in a
Garden" will not need to be reminded of Calvin and his interesting