ns in swimming are the
same as her position and actions in walking. She had fallen into a
place she did not like; naturally she tried to walk out, and the result
was that she swam ashore. Which shore? The home-love never fails: the
south side was the only shore for her, the one nearest home. She
scrambled out all dripping wet, up the muddy bank and through
coal-piles and dust-heaps, looking as black, dirty, and unroyal as it
was possible for a Cat to look.

Once the shock was over, the Royal-pedigreed Slummer began to feel
better for the plunge. A genial glow without from the bath, a genial
sense of triumph within, for had she not outwitted three of the big
Terrors?

Her nose, her memory, and her instinct of direction inclined her to get
on the track again; but the place was infested with those
Thunder-rollers, and prudence led her to turn aside and follow the
river-bank with its musky home-reminders; and thus she was spared the
unspeakable horrors of the tunnel.

She was over three days learning the manifold dangers and complexities
of the East River docks. Once she got by mistake on a ferryboat and was
carried over to Long Island; but she took an early boat back. At length
on the third night she reached familiar ground, the place she had
passed the night of her first escape. From that her course was sure and
rapid. She knew just where she was going and how to get there. She knew
even the more prominent features in the Dog-scape now. She went faster,
felt happier. In a little while surely she would be curled up in her
native Orient--the old junk-yard. Another turn, and the block was in
sight.

But--what! It was gone! Kitty couldn't believe her eyes; but she must,
for the sun was not yet up. There where once had stood or leaned or
slouched or straggled the houses of the block, was a great broken
wilderness of stone, lumber, and holes in the ground.

Kitty walked all around it. She knew by the bearings and by the local
color of the pavement that she was in her home, that there had lived
the bird-man, and there was the old junk-yard; but all were gone,
completely gone, taking their familiar odors with them, and Pussy
turned sick at heart in the utter hopelessness of the case. Her
place-love was her master-mood. She had given up all to come to a home
that no longer existed, and for once her sturdy little heart was cast
down. She wandered over the silent heaps of rubbish and found neither
consolation nor eatables. Th