enjoyed the possession of one pet who could not tyrannize over her.  Pink’s place was more than filled by Fun, who was so oppressively affectionate that he never could leave his mistress alone.  If she lay down on her bed, he leaped up and unlatched the door, and stretched himself on the white counterpane beside her with a grunt of satisfaction; if she sat down to knit or sew, he laid his head and shoulders across her lap, or curled himself up on her knees; if she was cooking, he whined and coaxed round her till she hardly knew whether she fried or broiled her steak; and if she turned him out and buttoned the door, his cries were so pitiful she could never be resolute enough to keep him in exile five minutes,—­for it was a prominent article in her creed, that animals have feelings that are easily wounded, and are of “like passions” with men, only incapable of expression.

Indeed, Miss Lucinda considered it the duty of human beings to atone to animals for the Lord’s injustice in making them dumb and four-legged.  She would have been rather startled at such an enunciation of her practice, but she was devoted to it as a practice:  she would give her own chair to the cat and sit on the settle herself; get up at midnight, if a mew or a bark called her, though the thermometer was below zero; The tenderloin of her steak or the liver of her chicken was saved for a pining kitten or an ancient and toothless cat; and no disease or wound daunted her faithful nursing, or disgusted her devoted tenderness.  It was rather hard on humanity, and rather reversive of Providence, that all this care and pains should be lavished on cats and dogs, while little morsels of flesh and blood, ragged, hungry, and immortal, wandered up and down the streets.  Perhaps that they were immortal was their defence from Miss Lucinda; one might have hoped that her “other-worldliness” accepted that fact as enough to outweigh present pangs, if she had not openly declared, to Israel Slater’s immense amusement and astonishment, that she believed creatures had souls,—­little ones perhaps, but souls after all, and she did expect to see Pink again some time or other.

“Well, I hope he’s got his tail feathered out ag’in,” said Israel, dryly.  “I do’no’ but what hair’d grow as well as feathers in a sperctooal state, and I never see a pictur’ of an angel but what hed consider’ble many feathers.”

Miss Lucinda looked rather confounded.  But humanity had one little revenge on her in the shape of her cat, a beautiful Maltese, with great yellow eyes, fur as soft as velvet, and silvery paws as lovely to look at as they were thistly to touch.  Toby certainly pleaded hard for Miss Lucinda’s theory of a soul; but his was no good one:  some tricksy and malign little spirit had lent him his share of intellect, and he used it to the entire subjugation of Miss Lucinda.  When he was hungry, he was as well-mannered and as amiable as a good child,—­he would coax, and purr, and lick her fingers with his pretty red