red it into
rolling itself into a ball, as everybody says it does when alarmed.
But it is perhaps just as well that the hedgehog did not merely repeat
itself in this way. We like a certain variety of behaviour in
animals--some element of the unexpected that always keeps our
curiosity alive and looking forward.

But we must not exaggerate the pleasure to be got from moles and
hedgehogs. They make a part of our being happy, but they do not
delight the whole of our being, as a child is delighted by the world
every spring. It is probably the child in us that responds most
wholeheartedly to such pleasures. They, like the hum of insects, help
to restore the illusion of a world that is perfectly happy because it
is such a Noah's Ark of a spectacle and everybody is kind. But, even
as we submit to the illusion in the garden, we become restive in our
deck-chairs and remember the telephone or the daily paper or a letter
that has to be written. And reality weighs on us, like a hand laid on
a top, making an end of the spinning, making an end of the music. The
world is no longer a toy dancing round and round. It is a problem, a
run-down machine, a stuffy room full of little stabbing creatures that
make an irritating noise.

V

CATS

The Champion Cat Show has been held at the Crystal Palace, but the
champion cat was not there. One could not possibly allow him to appear
in public. He is for show, but not in a cage. He does not compete,
because he is above competition. You know this as well as I. Probably
you possess him. I certainly do. That is the supreme test of a cat's
excellence--the test of possession. One does not say: "You should see
Brailsford's cat" or "You should see Adcock's cat" or "You should see
Sharp's cat," but "You should see our cat." There is nothing we are
more egoistic about--not even children--than about cats. I have heard
a man, for lack of anything better to boast about, boasting that his
cat eats cheese. In anyone else's cat it would have seemed an inferior
habit and only worth mentioning to the servant as a warning. But
because the cat happens to be his cat, this man talks about its vice
excitedly among women as though it were an accomplishment. It is
seldom that we hear a cat publicly reproached with guilt by anyone
above a cook. He is not permitted to steal from our own larder. But if
he visits the next-door house by stealth and returns over the wall
with a Dover sole in his jaws, we really