I was pained by the tone of your last letter.  Evidently mine of the Fourth of July did not please you.  Evidently you don’t like my politics or my philosophy, or my “deadly parallels,” or any of my thoughts about the present and future of my native land.  Destroy the letter.  Forget it, and we’ll talk of other things, and, to take a big jump—­

Did you ever keep cats?

There is a subject in which you can find no offence, and if it does not appeal to you it is your own fault.

If you never have kept cats, you have missed lots of fun, you are not half educated, you have not been disciplined at all. / A cat is a wonderful animal, but he is not a bit like what, on first making his acquaintance, you think he is going to be, and he never becomes it.

Now I have been living a year this September with one cat, and part of the time, with two.  I am wiser than I used to be.  By fits and starts I am more modest.

I used to think that a cat was a tame animal, who lapped milk, slept, rolled up ornamentally on a rug, now and then chased his tail, and now and then played gracefully with a ball, came and sat on your knee when you invited him, and caught mice, if mice came where he was.

All the cats I had seen in the homes of my friends surely did those things.  I thought them “so pretty,” “so graceful,” “so soft,” and I always said they “gave a cosy look to a room.”

But I had never been intimate with a cat.

When the English soldiers were here a year ago, Amelie came one morning bringing a kitten in her apron.  You remember I told you of this.  He was probably three months old—­so Amelie says, and she knows all about cats.  She said off-hand:  “C’est un chat du mois de juin.”  She seems to know what month well-behaved cats ought to be born.  So far as I know, they might be born in any old month.  He was like a little tiger, with a white face and shirt-front, white paws and lovely green eyes.

He had to have a name, so, as he had a lot of brown, the color of the English uniform, and came to me while the soldiers were here, I named him Khaki.  He accepted it, and answered to his name at once.  He got well rapidly.  His fur began to grow, and so did he.

At first he lived up to my idea of what a kitten should be.  He was always ready to play, but he had much more originality than I knew cats to have.  He was so amusing that I gave lots of time to him.  I had corks, tied to strings, hanging to all the door knobs and posts in the house, and, for hours at a time, he amused himself playing games like basket-ball and football with these corks.  I lost hours of my life watching him, and calling Amelie to “come quick” and see him.  His ingenuity was remarkable.  He would take the cork in his front paws, turn over on his back, and try to rip it open with his hind paws.  I suppose that was the way his tiger ancestors ripped open their prey.  He would carry the cork, attached to the post at the foot of the staircase, as far up the stairs as the string would allow him, lay it down and touch it gently to make it roll down the stairs so that he could spring after it and catch it before it reached the bottom.  All this was most satisfactory.  That was what I expected a cat to do.