re consulted about their own names. If
they were, these would perhaps be, as a rule, more appropriate.

What qualities of mind or body my name was supposed to illustrate, I
have not to this hour a notion. I distinctly remember the stage of my
kittenhood, when I thought that Toots was the English for cream.

"Toots! Toots!" my young mistress used to say, in the most suggestive
tones, creeping after me as I would creep after a mouse, with a
saucerful of that delicious liquid in her hand.

"Toots is first-rate stuff," I used to think, and I purred accordingly,
for I never was an ungrateful cat.

This was in the dining-room, and in the morning. Later in the day,
"Toots" was served in the drawing-room. It was between these two
periods, I remember, that one day I found myself in the larder. Why I
went there, puzzled me at the time; for if there is anything I hate it
is a chill, and there was a horrid draught through a window pierced with
tiny holes, which seemed to let in a separate blast for every hair of
one's fur. I followed the cook, it is true; but I did not follow the
cook as a rule--not, for instance, when she went out to the coal-hole in
the yard. I had slipped in under her dress. I was behind the potato-tub
when she went out, shutting the door after her. For some mysterious
reason I felt on the tip-claw of expectation. My nose twitched with
agreeable sensations. An inward voice seemed to murmur, _Toots_!
Regardless of the draughts, I sprang on to the shelf close under the
window. And there was such a dish of cream! The saucers in which one got
it at breakfast did not hold a twentieth part of what this brimming pan
contained. As to the five o'clock china, in which visitors give you a
tepid teaspoonful, with bits of old tea-leaves in it--I grinned at the
thought as I drew in tongueful after tongueful of the thick yellow
cream.

At this moment I heard my young mistress's voice in the distant
passages.

"Toots, Toots!" said she.

"I've got plenty," purred I, lifting my head to speak, by a great
effort.

"Toots, Toots!" she miowed on, for she wasn't much quicker-witted than
the rest of her race.

"No, thank you," thought I; "and if you want five o'clock toots for
yourself, I advise you to come here for it." I thought this, but speak I
really could not--I was too busy lapping.

It was delicious stuff! But when the dish was about three-parts empty, I
began to feel as if I had had a good deal, and to wish I had