Page:Under the Sun.djvu/237

Rh roofs of outhouses or under the bushes in the garden of the square. The cat, therefore, comes into our midst from motives of pure self-interest alone, joins the domestic circle simply for the sake of the comforts it affords her, and seats herself upon our particular hearth and home only because she finds herself warm there, and safe.

But at heart she is a vagabond, a tramp, and a gypsy. She is always “on the patter.” Our dwelling-places are really only so many casual wards to her, and she looks upon the basement floor of our houses as a fortuitous but convenient combination of a soup-kitchen and a lying-in hospital. When homeless she does not drown herself in despair, or go and buy poison from a chemist and kill herself. On the contrary, she avoids water with all the precaution possible, even so much as a puddle on the pavement, and carefully sniffs everything she sees lying about before she thinks of trying to eat it.

Nor does she, in desperation, go and steal something off a stall, in order to get locked up in shelter for the night, for she has instincts that teach her to avoid the coarse expedients with which homeless and starving humanity has so often to make such pathetic shift. The cat’s plan is the simplest possible. She merely walks along the street as far as the first house, and, to guard against passing dogs, puts herself at once on the right side of the railings. Here she sits until the back-door opens, and as soon as she sees a domestic coming out she mews plaintively. If the domestic says shoo to her, she shoos at once, for she understands that there is one cat already in the house. But she only goes next door, and there repeats her manoeuvre. The odds are that the next kitchen-maid does not say shoo to her,