"
"It will be awkward if it don't," said the friend.
"Oh, but I'm sure it will," replied our cat. "I must lick it more. It's
a tail that wants a good deal of licking, you can see that."
And for hours that afternoon, after the other cat had gone, she sat
trimming it; and, at the end, when she lifted her paw off it, and it flew
back again like a steel spring over the squirrel's head, she sat and
gazed at it with feelings that only those among my readers who have been
mothers themselves will be able to comprehend.
"What have I done," she seemed to say--"what have I done that this
trouble should come upon me?"
Jephson roused himself on my completion of this anecdote and sat up.
"You and your friends appear to have been the possessors of some very
remarkable cats," he observed.
"Yes," I answered, "our family has been singularly fortunate in its
cats."
"Singularly so," agreed Jephson; "I have never met but one man from whom
I have heard more wonderful cat talk than, at one time or another, I have
from you."
"Oh," I said, not, perhaps without a touch of jealousy in my voice, "and
who was he?"
"He was a seafaring man," replied Jephson. "I met him on a Hampstead
tram, and we discussed the subject of animal sagacity.
"'Yes, sir,' he said, 'monkeys is cute.
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