beneath him; he sometimes uttered a sort
of articulate and well-bred ejaculation, when he wished to call
attention to something that he considered remarkable, or to some want of
his, but he never went whining about. He would sit for hours at a closed
window, when he desired to enter, without a murmur, and when it was
opened he never admitted that he had been impatient by "bolting" in.
Though speech he had not, and the unpleasant kind of utterance given to
his race he would not use, he had a mighty power of purr to express his
measureless content with congenial society. There was in him a musical
organ with stops of varied power and expression, upon which I have no
doubt he could have performed Scarlatti's celebrated cat's-fugue.

Whether Calvin died of old age, or was carried off by one of the
diseases incident to youth, it is impossible to say; for his departure
was as quiet as his advent was mysterious. I only know that he appeared
to us in this world in his perfect stature and beauty, and that after a
time, like Lohengrin, he withdrew. In his illness there was nothing more
to be regretted than in all his blameless life. I suppose there never
was an illness that had more of dignity and sweetness and resignation in
it. It came on gradually, in a kind of listlessness and want of
appetite. An alarming symptom was his preference for the warmth of a
furnace-register to the lively sparkle of the open wood-fire. Whatever
pain he suffered, he bore it in silence, and seemed only anxious not to
obtrude his malady. We tempted him with the delicacies of the season,
but it soon became impossible for him to eat, and for two weeks he ate
or drank scarcely anything. Sometimes he made an effort to take
something, but it was evident that he made the effort to please us. The
neighbours--and I am convinced that the advice of neighbours is never
good for anything--suggested catnip. He wouldn't even smell it. We had
the attendance of an amateur practitioner of medicine, whose real office
was the cure of souls, but nothing touched his case. He took what was
offered, but it was with the air of one to whom the time for pellets was
passed. He sat or lay day after day almost motionless, never once making
a display of those vulgar convulsions or contortions of pain which are
so disagreeable to society. His favourite place was on the brightest
spot of a Smyrna rug by the conservatory, where the sunlight fell and he
could hear the fountain play. I