open upon the table, would lie down on it, turn over the edges of the leaves with his paw, and, after a time, fall asleep, for all the world as if he had been reading a fashionable novel. He gave a good deal of attention to my work, and, while I wrote, would follow the movement of my pen with serious scrutiny, taking note of each new line, and sometimes pushing the penholder gently from my fingers, as though anxious to add a few words of his own. He was an æsthetic cat, like Hoffmann's Murr, and had, I strongly suspect, been guilty of writing his memoirs; scribbling away probably at night, in some shadowy gutter, by the light of his own lambent eyes. Unhappily these invaluable reminiscences have been lost.
"Don Pierrot made a point of never going to bed until I came home. He used to wait for me in the hall, greet me with friendly purrs, and precede me to my chamber like a page. I have no doubt that, if I had asked him, he would have carried the candlestick. He slept on the back of my bedstead, carefully balanced like a bird on a bough, and, when I awoke in the morning, would jump down and nestle beside me until I arose. He was strict as a concierge, however, in his notions of the proper time for all good people to be indoors, and would tolerate nothing later than midnight. In those days I belonged to a little society, known as 'The
