Pussy, Philip’s sixth domestic, had attained her majority; she had never gone after snakes in her youth, and had always avoided bad company.  She did her duty in the house as a good mouser, and when mice grew scarce she went hunting for game; she had a hole under the eaves near the chimney, through which she could enter the hut at any time of the night or day.  While Philip was musing after tea on the “Pons Asinorum” by the light of a tallow candle, Pussy was out poaching for quail, and as soon as she caught one she brought it home, dropped it on the floor, rubbed her side against Philip’s boot, and said, “I have brought a little game for breakfast.”  Then Philip stroked her along the back, after which she lay down before the fire, tucked in her paws and fell asleep, with a good conscience.

But many bush cats come to an unhappy and untimely end by giving way to the vice of curiosity.  When Dinah, the vain kitten, takes her first walk abroad in spring time, she observes something smooth and shiny gliding gently along.  She pricks up her ears, and gazes at the interesting stranger; then she goes a little nearer, softly lifting first one paw and then another.

The stranger is more intelligent than Dinah.  He says to himself, “I know her sort well, the silly thing.  Saw her ages ago in the Garden.  She wants mice and frogs and such things—­takes the bread out of my mouth.  Native industry must be protected.” so the stranger brings his head round under the grass and waits for Dinah, who is watching his tail.  The tail moves a little and then a little more.  Dinah says, “It will be gone if I don’t mind,” and she jumps for it.  At that instant the snake strikes her on the nose with his fangs.  Dinah’s fur rises on end with sudden fright, she shakes her head, and the snake drops off.  She turns away, and says, “This is frightful; what a deceitful world!  Life is not worth living.”  Her head feels queer, and being sleepy she lies down, and is soon a dead cat.

That summer was very hot at Nyalong, one hundred and ten degrees in the shade.  Philip began to find his bed of stringy bark very hard, and as it grew older it curled together so much that he could scarcely turn in it from one side to the other.  So he made a mattress which he stuffed with straw, and he found it much softer than the stringy bark.  But after a while the mattress grew flat, and the stuffing lumpy.  Sometimes on hot days he took out his bed, and after shaking it, he laid it down on the grass; his blankets he hung on the fence for many reasons which he wanted to get rid of.

The water in the forty-acre to the south was all dried up.  An old black snake with a streak of orange along his ribs grew thirsty.  His last meal was a mouse, and he said, “That was a dry mouthful, and wants something to wash it down.”  He knew his way to the water-hole at the end of the garden, but he had to pass the hut, which when he travelled that way the summer before was unoccupied.