FOOTNOTES: 

Footnote B:  Patteran = the gipsy “trail.”

Footnote C:  “Poknees,” gipsy word for magistrate.

TOOTS AND BOOTS.

* * * * *

CHAPTER I.

My name is Toots.  Why, I have not the slightest idea.  But I suppose very few people—­cats or otherwise—­are consulted about their own names.  If they were, these would perhaps be, as a rule, more appropriate.

What qualities of mind or body my name was supposed to illustrate, I have not to this hour a notion.  I distinctly remember the stage of my kittenhood, when I thought that Toots was the English for cream.

“Toots!  Toots!” my young mistress used to say, in the most suggestive tones, creeping after me as I would creep after a mouse, with a saucerful of that delicious liquid in her hand.

“Toots is first-rate stuff,” I used to think, and I purred accordingly, for I never was an ungrateful cat.

This was in the dining-room, and in the morning.  Later in the day, “Toots” was served in the drawing-room.  It was between these two periods, I remember, that one day I found myself in the larder.  Why I went there, puzzled me at the time; for if there is anything I hate it is a chill, and there was a horrid draught through a window pierced with tiny holes, which seemed to let in a separate blast for every hair of one’s fur.  I followed the cook, it is true; but I did not follow the cook as a rule—­not, for instance, when she went out to the coal-hole in the yard.  I had slipped in under her dress.  I was behind the potato-tub when she went out, shutting the door after her.  For some mysterious reason I felt on the tip-claw of expectation.  My nose twitched with agreeable sensations.  An inward voice seemed to murmur, Toots!  Regardless of the draughts, I sprang on to the shelf close under the window.  And there was such a dish of cream!  The saucers in which one got it at breakfast did not hold a twentieth part of what this brimming pan contained.  As to the five o’clock china, in which visitors give you a tepid teaspoonful, with bits of old tea-leaves in it—­I grinned at the thought as I drew in tongueful after tongueful of the thick yellow cream.

At this moment I heard my young mistress’s voice in the distant passages.

“Toots, Toots!” said she.

“I’ve got plenty,” purred I, lifting my head to speak, by a great effort.

“Toots, Toots!” she miowed on, for she wasn’t much quicker-witted than the rest of her race.

“No, thank you,” thought I; “and if you want five o’clock toots for yourself, I advise you to come here for it.”  I thought this, but speak I really could not—­I was too busy lapping.

It was delicious stuff!  But when the dish was about three-parts empty, I began to feel as if I had had a good deal, and to wish I had more appetite for the rest.  “It’s a shame to leave it, though,” I thought, “when a few more laps will empty the dish.”  For I come of an ancient and rough-tongued cat family, who always lick their platters clean.  So I set to work again, though the draught was most annoying, and froze the cream to butter on my whiskers.