him off, and it's my
belief that if I had married her she would have made me turn missionary,
or pirate, or anything else that she thought best. I shall never cease
to be grateful to Thomas Aquinas for saving me from that woman.

"This was the way of it. I was living in a little cottage that belonged
to my uncle, and that he let me have rent free on condition that I
should take care of it, and keep the grounds in an attractive state
until he could sell it. I had an old negro housekeeper and two cats. One
of them, Martha Washington by name, was young and handsome, and about as
bright a cat as I ever knew. She had a strong sense of humour, too,
which is unusual with cats, and when something amused her she would
throw back her head and open her mouth wide, and laugh a silent laugh
that was as hearty and rollicking as a Methodist parson's laugh when he
hears a grey-haired joke at a negro minstrel show. Martha was perhaps
the most popular cat in the town, and there was scarcely a minute in the
day when there wasn't some one of her admirers in the back yard. As for
serenades, she had three or four every night that it didn't rain. There
was a quartette club formed by four first-class feline voices, and the
club used to give Martha and me two or three hours of music three times
a week. I used sometimes to find as many as six or seven old boots in
the back yard of a morning that had been contributed by enthusiastic
neighbours. As for society, Martha Washington was at the top of the
heap. There wasn't a more fashionable cat in the whole State of Ohio--I
was living in Ohio at the time--and in spite of it all she was as simple
and unaffected in her ways as if she had been born and bred in a Quaker
meeting-house.

[Illustration: "I HAD AN OLD NEGRO HOUSEKEEPER AND TWO CATS."]

"One afternoon Martha was giving a four o'clock milk on the verandah
next to my room. I always gave her permission to give that sort of
entertainment whenever she wanted to, for the gossip of her friends used
to be very amusing to me. Among the guests that afternoon was
Susan's--that was the young lady I wanted to marry--Maltese cat. Now
this cat had always pretended to be very fond of me, and Susan often
said that her cat never made a mistake in reading character, and that
the cat's approval of me was equivalent to a first-class Sunday-school
certificate of moral character. I didn't care anything about the cat
myself, for somehow I didn't place any confide