retty black fur made, lined with
cherry silk, and finished off with tiny tassels.

I loved the dear old puss, but I knew the moths would get her skin if I
kept it, and preferred to rejoice the hearts of several small friends
with dolls in full winter costume. I am sure Mrs. Bunch would have
agreed with me, and not felt that I treated her remains with disrespect.

The last of my cats was the blackest of all, and such a wild thing we
called him the Imp. He tumbled into the garret one day through a broken
scuttle, and took possession of the house from that time forth, acting
as if bewitched.

He got into the furnace pipes, but could not get out, and kept me up one
whole night, giving him air and light, food and comfort, through a
little hole in the floor, while waiting for a carpenter to come and saw
him out.

He got a sad pinch in his tail, which made it crooked forever after. He
fell into the soft-soap barrel, and was fished out a deplorable
spectacle. He was half strangled by a fine collar we put on him, and was
found hanging by it on a peg.

People sat down on him, for he would lie in chairs. No one loved him
much, for he was not amiable in temper, but bit and scratched if
touched, worried the bows off our slippers in his play, and if we did
not attend to him at once, he complained in the most tremendous bass
growl I ever heard.

He was not beautiful, but very impressive; being big, without a white
hair on him. One eye was blue and one green, and the green one was
always half shut, as if he was winking at you, which gave him a rowdy
air comical to see. Then he swaggered in his walk, never turned out for
any one, and if offended fell into rages fit to daunt the bravest soul.

Yes, the Imp was truly an awful animal; and when a mischievous cousin of
ours told us he wanted a black cat, without a single white hair on it,
to win a wager with, we at once offered ours.

It seems that sailors are so superstitious they will not sail in a ship
with a black cat; and this rogue of a cousin was going to send puss off
on a voyage, unknown to any one but the friend who took him, and when
the trip was safely over, he was to be produced as a triumphant proof of
the folly of the nautical superstition.

So the Imp was delivered to his new master, and sailed away packed up in
an old fishing-basket, with his head poked out of a hole in the cover.

We waited anxiously to hear how the joke ended; but unfortunately the
passage was