everything--yes, but she wanted something else. Plenty to eat and
drink--yes, but milk does not taste the same when you can go and
drink all you want from a saucer; it has to be stolen out of a
tin pail when you are belly-pinched with hunger and thirst, or it
does not have the tang--it isn't milk.

Yes, there was a junk-yard back of the house and beside it and
around it too, a big one, but it was everywhere poisoned and
polluted with roses. The very Horses and Dogs had the wrong
smells; the whole country round was a repellent desert of
lifeless, disgusting gardens and hay-fields, without a single
tenement or smoke-stack in sight. How she did hate it all! There
was only one sweet-smelling shrub in the whole horrible place,
and that was in a neglected corner. She did enjoy nipping that
and rolling in the leaves; it was a bright spot in the grounds;
but the only one, for she had not found a rotten fish-head nor
seen a genuine garbage-can since she came, and altogether it was
the most unlovely, unattractive, unsmellable spot she had ever
known. She would surely have gone that first night had she had
the liberty. The liberty was weeks in coming, and, meanwhile, her
affinity with the cook had developed as a bond to keep her; but
one day after a summer of discontent a succession of things
happened to stir anew the slum instinct of the royal prisoner.

A great bundle of stuff from the docks had reached the country
mansion. What it contained was of little moment, but it was rich
with a score of the most piquant and winsome of dock and slum
smells. The chords of memory surely dwell in the nose, and
Pussy's past was conjured up with dangerous force. Next day the
cook 'left' through some trouble over this very bundle. It was