Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 38.djvu/384

370 had been brought half frozen to the house to be taken care of. She was found in his box trying "to quiet him and get him to accept her as his mother. Her kitten would cry, and she would leave the pig for a few minutes and go and quiet that, and then she would go back to the pig and try her best to make him comfortable." At last she took her kitten into the box with the pig. Rosy, an excellent ratter on a Belfast schooner, made friends at once with a pet rat that was brought on board, slept and played with it for two weeks, and allowed it to take many liberties with herself. Don Pierrot de Navarre and Seraphita, cats of Théophile Gautier, lived on the most friendly terms with their master's troop of white rats. Don Pierrot was especially fond of the rats, and would sit by their cage and watch them for hours together. If the door of the room where they were kept happened to be shut, he would insist, by scratching and mewing, on its being opened to him. Tabby, of Hyde Park, near Boston, having lost her kittens, took a brood of motherless chickens under her care. Knowing of them, she begged to be admitted to them. The experiment was tried. She looked at them a moment, then sprang into the box and, purring, nestled down among them. This was the beginning of a constant service of six months, during which Tabby would play with the chickens; would try to carry them by the neck as she would her own kittens; and persisted in licking their feathers the wrong way.

Mr. J. M. Coffinberry, of Cleveland, Ohio, writes to us that when, some forty-three years ago, he took possession of a certain house in Findlay, Ohio, the attention of the family "was called to a brood of young chicks by a cat who seemed to devote her time and attention to them. The ground being covered with two or three inches of snow, my wife fed them regularly, so that we saw much of them. The cat frequently purred to them, and they came at her call and followed her as closely as young chickens follow the mother hen. They lodged together in a wood-shed adjacent to the house for about three months, but in the early spring the chickens, being well fledged, abandoned their winter quarters and flew into the higher branches of a fruit tree to roost. The cat purred and mewed, and seemed much disgusted at their change of lodgings, but soon accepted the situation and climbed to the tree-top and roosted with the chickens." This continued during the few months that the family occupied this house. Mr. Coffinberry asks some questions as to what was in the cat's mind or heart that prompted her to this parental act. It is easily explained if the qualities which he and many authors claim for cats are conceded to them. A correspondent, M C, of Nature, tells of a cat and dog who, having been brought into the family at about the same time, grew up friends and fast