and always, under the shadow of the friendly pines."

Probably no modern cat has been more written about than Miss Mary L.
Booth's Muff. There was a "Tippet," but he was early lost. Miss Booth,
as the editor of _Harper's Bazar_, was the centre of a large circle
of literary and musical people. Her Saturday evenings were to New York
what Mrs. Moulton's Fridays are to Boston, the nearest approach to the
French salon possible in America. At these Saturday evenings Muff always
figured prominently, being dressed in a real lace collar (brought him
from Yucatan by Madame la Plongeon, and elaborate and expensive enough
for the most fastidious lady), and apparently enjoying the company of
noted intellectual people as well as the best of them. And who knows, if
he had spoken, what light he might have shed on what seemed to mere
mortals as mysterious, abstruse, and occult problems? Perhaps, after
all, he liked that "salon" because in reality he found so much to amuse
him in the conversation; and perhaps he was, under that guise of
friendly interest in noted scientists, reformers, poets, musicians, and
litterateurs, only whispering to himself, "O Lord, what fools these
mortals be!"

"For when I play with my cat," says Montaigne, "how do I know whether
she does not make a jest of me?"

But Muff was a real nobleman among cats, and extraordinarily handsome.
He was a great soft gray maltese with white paws and breast--mild,
amiable, and uncommonly intelligent. He felt it his duty to help
entertain Miss Booth's guests, always; and he more than once, at the
beginning of a reception, came into the drawing-room with a mouse in his
mouth as his offering to the occasion. Naturally enough "he caused the
stampede," as Mrs. Spofford puts it, "that Mr. Gilbert forgot to put