how she
should have ever come to do so. Presently she noted a small knot in
the woodwork of the sill, and it flashed upon her that she had
accidentally killed the fly, and that this was its dead body. She
tried to move it gently with her paw, but it was no use, and for the
time she satisfied herself that the knot and the fly had nothing to
do with one another. Every now and then, however, she returned to
it as though it were the only thing she could think of, and she
would try it again. She seemed to say she was certain there had
been no knot there before--she must have seen it if there had been;
and yet, the fly could hardly have got jammed so firmly into the
wood. She was puzzled and irritated beyond measure, and kept
looking in the same place again and again, just as we do when we
have mislaid something. She was rapidly losing temper and dignity
when suddenly we saw the fly reappear from under the cat's stomach
and make for the window-pane, at the very moment when the cat
herself was exclaiming for the fiftieth time that she wondered where
that stupid fly ever could have got to. No man who has been hunting
twenty minutes for his spectacles could be more delighted when he
suddenly finds them on his own forehead. "So that's where you
were," we seemed to hear her say, as she proceeded to catch it, and
again began rolling it very softly without hurting it, under her
paw.

My friend and I both noticed that the cat, in spite of her
perplexity, never so much as hinted that we were the culprits. The
question whether anything outside the window could do her good or
harm had long since been settled by her in the negative, and she was
not going to reopen it; she simply cut us dead, and though her
annoyance was so great that she was manifestly ready to lay the
blame on anybody or anything with or without reason, and though she
must have perfectly well known that we were watching the whole
affair with amusement, she never either asked us if we had happened
to see such a thing as a fly go down our way lately, or accused us
of having taken it from her--both of which ideas she would, I am
confident, have been very well able to convey to us if she had been
so minded.

Now what are thought and reason if the processes that were going
through this cat's mind were not both one and the other? It would
be childish to suppose that the cat thought in words of its own, or
in anything like words. Its thinking was probably conduc