in the twilight, and it was difficult to believe that so small an animal had made so great a noise.  The pleasure of recognition, unfortunately, was not mutual.  No sooner did the hedgehog hear a foot pressing on the road than it gave up all thoughts of its supper of insects and hobbled back into the thicket.  I regretted only that I had not made a greater noise, and scared it into rolling itself into a ball, as everybody says it does when alarmed.  But it is perhaps just as well that the hedgehog did not merely repeat itself in this way.  We like a certain variety of behaviour in animals—­some element of the unexpected that always keeps our curiosity alive and looking forward.

But we must not exaggerate the pleasure to be got from moles and hedgehogs.  They make a part of our being happy, but they do not delight the whole of our being, as a child is delighted by the world every spring.  It is probably the child in us that responds most wholeheartedly to such pleasures.  They, like the hum of insects, help to restore the illusion of a world that is perfectly happy because it is such a Noah’s Ark of a spectacle and everybody is kind.  But, even as we submit to the illusion in the garden, we become restive in our deck-chairs and remember the telephone or the daily paper or a letter that has to be written.  And reality weighs on us, like a hand laid on a top, making an end of the spinning, making an end of the music.  The world is no longer a toy dancing round and round.  It is a problem, a run-down machine, a stuffy room full of little stabbing creatures that make an irritating noise.

V

CATS

The Champion Cat Show has been held at the Crystal Palace, but the champion cat was not there.  One could not possibly allow him to appear in public.  He is for show, but not in a cage.  He does not compete, because he is above competition.  You know this as well as I. Probably you possess him.  I certainly do.  That is the supreme test of a cat’s excellence—­the test of possession.  One does not say:  “You should see Brailsford’s cat” or “You should see Adcock’s cat” or “You should see Sharp’s cat,” but “You should see our cat.”  There is nothing we are more egoistic about—­not even children—­than about cats.  I have heard a man, for lack of anything better to boast about, boasting that his cat eats cheese.  In anyone else’s cat it would have seemed an inferior habit and only worth mentioning to the servant as a warning.  But because the cat happens to be his cat, this man talks about its vice excitedly among women as though it were an accomplishment.  It is seldom that we hear a cat publicly reproached with guilt by anyone above a cook.  He is not permitted to steal from our own larder.  But if he visits the next-door house by stealth and returns over the wall with a Dover sole in his jaws, we really cannot help laughing.  We are a little nervous at first, and our mirth is tinged with pity at the thought of