rse, living at the top of a London apartment house, had a cherished
cat by name of Fettles, who never touched the ground from September to
June. Rooms and corridor limited his promenades, except for a long box
of plants that filled the diminutive balcony. To the casual eye he
seemed well content with his cloistered life, purring on cozy cushions,
performing painstaking toilets, cuddling down on the table close to the
arm of his mistress as she read and wrote, even condescending, for her
pleasure, to play with a tassel or ball, but I noted that my arrivals
brought to Fettles a quivering excitement. It was not my conversation,
which he ignored, nor my gifts, for after his first scandalous orgy on
American catnip I was forbidden to bring him anything more tempting
than a chocolate mouse. It was my boots, especially if I had been
walking across Regent Park and brought in honest earth instead of
pavement scraps and taxi smells. Fettles would rush to my feet and
sniff at sole and heel and toe, arching his back and lashing his tail
when the odors brought him peculiarly thrilling tidings of the strange
world so far below his balcony. In the summer he was the guest of a
Devonshire cottage, but for the first week or two he would be
frightened by the vastness and queerness of out-of-doors. He would
crouch for hours on the threshold, looking out with mingled ecstasy and
terror on the garden, now and then reaching down a dubious paw to touch
the warm brown earth. By degrees he could be coaxed to join his
mistress at afternoon tea under the plum trees, cautiously placing
himself in touch of the hem of her gown. The summer would be half over
before he was at ease in his brief Paradise.

Fettles, by the way, was succeeded by Thomas Heywood, and Tommy Heywood
by Sisi, the only Londoner I know who enjoyed the air-raids. Whenever a
Zeppelin alarm scared the lodgers out of their "honey-heavy dew of
slumber," Sisi had the sport of his life. Knowing that his mistress,
even if a bomb were crashing through her ceiling, would not abandon
him, he would dash hither and yon in a rapture of disobedience, now
under the bed, now behind a bookcase, continually evading her frenzied
clutches. Slippered feet went skurrying past the door, but still Sisi
sprang and scampered, even wheeling about in giddy circles as if this
were the chance of chances for a kitten to catch its tail. My friend,
with Sisi clasped to her panting breast, was invariably the last l