her
out on the porch-roof, where she has her choice to stay and starve or
jump off. This satisfies my conscience while giving a good lesson to
the cat, who is not fond of saltatory feats, now that she is getting
into years. If it is after her kind to prey upon birds, and she must
therefore not be beaten, it is also after her kind to leap from
anywhere and come down on her feet, and therefore the thing does not
harm her. Whenever she does stealthily worm herself in, Cheri gives
the pitch the moment he sets eyes on her. Cat looks up steadily at him
for five minutes. Cheri, confident, strikes out in a very tempting
way. Cat describes a semicircle around the window, back and forth, back
and forth, keeping ever her back to the room and her front to the foe,
glaring and mewing and licking her chaps. O, what a delicious tit-bit,
if one could but get at it! Cheri sings relentlessly. Like Shirley
with Louis Moore in her clutches, he will not subdue one of his charms
in compassion.

"Certes it is NOT of herte, all that he sings."

She leaps into a chair. Not a quarter high enough. She jumps to the
window-seat, and walks to and fro, managing the turning-points with
much difficulty. Impossible. She goes over to the other window.
Still worse. She takes up position on the sofa, and her whole soul
exhales into one want.

She mews and licks her chaps alternately. Cheri "pitilessly sweet"
sings with unsparing insolence at the top of his voice, and looks
indifferently over her head.

That is the extent of his society. "It is too bad," I said one day,
and scoured the country for a canary-bird. Everybody had had one, but
it was sold. Then I remembered Barnum's Happy Family, and went out to
the hen-pen, and brought in a little auburn chicken, with white breast,
and wings just budding; a size and a half larger than Cheri, it is
true, but the smallest of the lot, and very soft and small for a
chicken, the prettiest wee, waddling tot you ever saw, a Minnie Warren
of a little duck, and put him in the cage. A tempest in a teapot!
Cheri went immediately into fits and furies. He hopped about
convulsively. You might have supposed him attacked simultaneously with
St. Anthony's fire, St. Vitus's dance, and delirium tremens. He
shrieked, he writhed, he yelled, he raved. The chicken was stupid. If
he had exerted himself a little to be agreeable, if he had only shown
the smallest symptom of interest or curiosity or desire