. The trouble was, she
possessed a cat, a nice gentle animal not often at home, but it was
dreadful to think of what might happen at any moment should pussy walk
in when her visitor was with her. Then, one day, pussy did walk in when
the rat was present, purring loudly, her tail held stiffly up, showing
that she was in her usual sweet temper. On catching sight of the rat,
she appeared to know intuitively that it was there as a privileged
guest, while the rat on its part seemed to know, also by intuition, that
it had nothing to fear. At all events these two quickly became friends
and were evidently pleased to be together, as they now spent most of the
time in the room, and would drink milk from the same saucer, and sleep
bunched up together, and were extremely intimate.

By and by the rat began to busy herself making a nest in a corner of the
kitchen under a cupboard, and it became evident that there would soon be
an increase in the rat population. She now spent her time running about
and gathering little straws, feathers, string, and anything of the kind
she could pick up, also stealing or begging for strips of cotton, or
bits of wool and thread from the work-basket. Now it happened that her
friend was one of those cats with huge tufts of soft hair on the two
sides of her face; a cat of that type, which is not uncommon, has a
quaint resemblance to a Mid-Victorian gentleman with a pair of
magnificent side-whiskers of a silky softness covering both cheeks and
flowing down like a double beard. The rat suddenly discovered that this
hair was just what she wanted to add a cushion-like lining to her nest,
so that her naked pink little ratlings should be born into the softest
of all possible worlds. At once she started plucking out the hairs, and
the cat, taking it for a new kind of game, but a little too rough to
please her, tried for a while to keep her head out of reach and to throw
the rat off. But she wouldn't be thrown off, and as she persisted in
flying back and jumping at the cat's face and plucking the hairs, the
cat quite lost her temper and administered a blow with her claws
unsheathed.

The rat fled to her refuge to lick her wounds, and was no doubt as much
astonished at the sudden change in her friend's disposition as the cat
had been at the rat's new way of showing her playfulness. The result was
that when, after attending her scratches, she started upon her task of
gathering soft materials, she left the cat seve