tranquillity resulted from contentment with his circumstances or resignation to fate.
My husband, however, acquired a strange regard for his pet, and one afternoon as I was returning from a walk he met me with a face so melancholy that I saw immediately that something had gone wrong. "Timothy is lost," he said. It appeared that he had fallen asleep on the sofa with Timothy lying beside him in his open basket, and when he woke up the cradle was empty. We felt sure that the cat knew all about it, but that did not make the matter any better, and, after hunting for him all over the garden with no success, we gave Timothy up as lost for ever. But the next evening a smiling boy walked up to our front door with the question, "Had we lost our Mountain Devil?" and behold, Timothy lay in his hand.
The boy had found him creeping through a fence, taking a direct course for Mount Douraking and his native granite; and as, when recaptured, he was blind of one eye, we felt more than ever confirmed in our suspicions that the cat was responsible for his abduction from his basket, and that she had dropped him on finding that his thorns made him an awkward mouthful.
We again gave him his bed of wool, and tethered him once more to feed on the ants in the garden, and I cannot say that the loss of his eye seemed to weigh much on his spirits as he had never appeared to have any; but in a day or two afterwards we noticed that his colours appeared unnatural in hue, and on examining him closely, we found that our poor Timothy was dead. A plain grave in the garden was, we thought, below the merits of one who
