My grandmother, shocked and grieved beyond expression, gave up her barrel and adopted bottles.  The cat, thus condemned to enforced abstinence, meandered about the house for a day and a half in a disconsolate, quarrelsome mood.  Then she disappeared, returning at eleven o’clock as tight as a drum.

Where she went, and how she managed to procure the drink, we never discovered; but the same programme was repeated every day.  Some time during the morning she would contrive to elude our vigilance and escape; and late every evening she would come reeling home across the fields in a condition that I will not sully my pen by attempting to describe.

It was on Saturday night that she met the sad end to which I have before alluded.  She must have been very drunk, for the man told us that, in consequence of the darkness, and the fact that his horses were tired, he was proceeding at little more than a snail’s pace.

I think my grandmother was rather relieved than otherwise.  She had been very fond of the cat at one time, but its recent conduct had alienated her affection.  We children buried it in the garden under the mulberry tree, but the old lady insisted that there should be no tombstone, not even a mound raised.  So it lies there, unhonoured, in a drunkard’s grave.

I also told him of another cat our family had once possessed.  She was the most motherly thing I have ever known.  She was never happy without a family.  Indeed, I cannot remember her when she hadn’t a family in one stage or another.  She was not very particular what sort of a family it was.  If she could not have kittens, then she would content herself with puppies or rats.  Anything that she could wash and feed seemed to satisfy her.  I believe she would have brought up chickens if we had entrusted them to her.

All her brains must have run to motherliness, for she hadn’t much sense.  She could never tell the difference between her own children and other people’s.  She thought everything young was a kitten.  We once mixed up a spaniel puppy that had lost its own mother among her progeny.  I shall never forget her astonishment when it first barked.  She boxed both its ears, and then sat looking down at it with an expression of indignant sorrow that was really touching.

“You’re going to be a credit to your mother,” she seemed to be saying “you’re a nice comfort to any one’s old age, you are, making a row like that.  And look at your ears flopping all over your face.  I don’t know where you pick up such ways.”

He was a good little dog.  He did try to mew, and he did try to wash his face with his paw, and to keep his tail still, but his success was not commensurate with his will.  I do not know which was the sadder to reflect upon, his efforts to become a creditable kitten, or his foster-mother’s despair of ever making him one.