He had his limitations.  Whatever passion he had for nature, he had no conception of art.  There was sent to him once a fine and very expressive cat’s head in bronze, by Fremiet.  I placed it on the floor.  He regarded it intently, approached it cautiously and crouchingly, touched it with his nose, perceived the fraud, turned away abruptly, and never would notice it afterward.  On the whole, his life was not only a successful one, but a happy one.  He never had but one fear, so far as I know:  he had a mortal and a reasonable terror of plumbers.  He would never stay in the house when they were here.  No coaxing could quiet him.  Of course he did n’t share our fear about their charges, but he must have had some dreadful experience with them in that portion of his life which is unknown to us.  A plumber was to him the devil, and I have no doubt that, in his scheme, plumbers were foreordained to do him mischief.

In speaking of his worth, it has never occurred to me to estimate Calvin by the worldly standard.  I know that it is customary now, when any one dies, to ask how much he was worth, and that no obituary in the newspapers is considered complete without such an estimate.  The plumbers in our house were one day overheard to say that, “They say that she says that he says that he wouldn’t take a hundred dollars for him.”  It is unnecessary to say that I never made such a remark, and that, so far as Calvin was concerned, there was no purchase in money.

As I look back upon it, Calvin’s life seems to me a fortunate one, for it was natural and unforced.  He ate when he was hungry, slept when he was sleepy, and enjoyed existence to the very tips of his toes and the end of his expressive and slow-moving tail.  He delighted to roam about the garden, and stroll among the trees, and to lie on the green grass and luxuriate in all the sweet influences of summer.  You could never accuse him of idleness, and yet he knew the secret of repose.  The poet who wrote so prettily of him that his little life was rounded with a sleep, understated his felicity; it was rounded with a good many.  His conscience never seemed to interfere with his slumbers.  In fact, he had good habits and a contented mind.  I can see him now walk in at the study door, sit down by my chair, bring his tail artistically about his feet, and look up at me with unspeakable happiness in his handsome face.  I often thought that he felt the dumb limitation which denied him the power of language.  But since he was denied speech, he scorned the inarticulate mouthings of the lower animals.  The vulgar mewing and yowling of the cat species was beneath him; he sometimes uttered a sort of articulate and well-bred ejaculation, when he wished to call attention to something that he considered remarkable, or to some want of his, but he never went whining about.  He would sit for hours at a closed window, when he desired to enter, without a murmur, and when it was opened, he never admitted that he had been impatient by “bolting” in.  Though speech he had not, and the unpleasant kind of utterance given to his race he would not use, he had a mighty power of purr to express his measureless content with congenial society.  There was in him a musical organ with stops of varied power and expression, upon which I have no doubt he could have performed Scarlatti’s celebrated cat’s-fugue.