. I am ambitious to be the Mrs. Inchbald of
Cats and I beg you to have consideration for my noble efforts, O! French
Cats, among whom has risen the noblest house of our race, that of Puss
in Boots, eternal type of Advertiser, whom so many men have imitated but
to whom no one has yet erected a monument.

I was born at the home of a parson in Catshire, near the little town of
Miaulbury. My mother's fecundity condemned nearly all her infants to a
cruel fate, because, as you know, the cause of the maternal intemperance
of English cats, who threaten to populate the whole world, has not yet
been decided. Toms and females each insist it is due to their own
amiability and respective virtues. But impertinent observers have
remarked that Cats in England are required to be so boringly proper that
this is their only distraction. Others pretend that herein may lie
concealed great questions of commerce and politics, having to do with
the English rule of India, but these matters are not for my paws to
write of and I leave them to the _Edinburgh-Review_. I was not drowned
with the others on account of the whiteness of my robe. Also I was named
Beauty. Alas! the parson, who had a wife and eleven daughters, was too
poor to keep me. An elderly female noticed that I had an affection for
the parson's Bible; I slept on it all the time, not because I was
religious, but because it was the only clean spot I could find in the
house. She believed, perhaps, that I belonged to the sect of sacred
animals which had already furnished the she-ass of Balaam, and took me
away with her. I was only two months old at this time. This old woman,
who gave evenings for which she sent out cards inscribed _Tea and
Bible_, tried to communicate to me the fatal science of the daughters of
Eve. Her method, which consisted in delivering long lectures on personal
dignity and on the obligations due the world, was a very successful one.
In order to avoid these lectures one submitted to martyrdom.

One morning I, a poor little daughter of Nature, attracted by a bowl of
cream, covered by a muffin, knocked the muffin off with my paw, and
lapped the cream. Then in joy, and perhaps also on account of the
weakness of my young organs, I delivered myself on the waxed floor to
the imperious need which young Cats feel. Perceiving the proofs of what
she called my intemperance and my faults of education, the old woman
seized me and whipped me vigorously with a birchrod, protesting t