with a bang, spat, and finished me
up as he might have finished the moon.

"You Lie!" said Professor Bopp.

How could I continue the argument under
these distressing circumstances? The lie was
not given to me offensively, but merely in the
guise of a syllogism, which the professor was
prepared to defend and prove; and surely a
man who could finish up the moon must have
been strong enough in argument to convict me
of falsehood. So I merely sighed, withdrew
from the professional presence, and left
Schinkenhausen that very night, more convinced
than ever that argument was not my
forte.

One more anecdote and we shall go to the
dogs—to the cats and dogs, I mean. What
anecdote shall it be?—that of the strong young
man in Westmoreland with whom I had an argument
about Napoleon Bonaparte, and really
did defeat and rout, but who, as usual,
finished me up, by saying, "Thee mayst know
a deal aboot Boneypartey, but I'll jump thee
for two pund!" No; that anecdote does not
bear on cats and dogs: we must try another.
I was arguing with a gentleman from Scotland.
I had studied the subject of our argument
deeply, and for a long time, and really fancied
that I was making some impression upon my
opponent. The gentleman from Scotland
heard me very patiently out, and when I had
come, as I thought, to a triumphant peroration,
he said, quietly:

"Sir, ye are jest the maist ignorant pairson
I ever met, but ye have some pairception of
what ye are talking aboot."

Now this is exactly my case with reference
to cats and dogs. Of them, as cats or as dogs,
I am as superlatively ignorant as the Scotch
gentleman found me in argument. I declare,
upon my honour, that I don't know how
many teeth a dog has, or why there should be
electricity in a cat's back. I have heard that
a cat has nine lives; but I am distressingly
ignorant of the average duration of those
lives. I have heard of Buffon, Cuvier, and the
Zoological Gardens in the Regent's Park; but
I know little about Natural History not so
much even as poor Goldsmith, who, though
engaged to write an Animal Creation for the
booksellers, was so ignorant of the conformation
and habits of animals, that every friend
who called upon him was laid under contribution
to describe some member of the brute
creation; and the walls of the Doctor's study
were scrawled over with charcoal memoranda
about lions and tigers, otters and jackals,
guinea-pigs, and hippopotami.

Yet, still keeping my Scotch friend in mind,
though a most ignorant person, I think that I
have some perception of the subject I am
writing about—cats and dogs. I don't know
anything about them, but I feel a good deal
about them. I have studied cats and dogs as
I study most things—in a rambling, discursive,
and to say the truth, somewhat vagabond
fashion—by neglecting those parts of the subject
ordinarily adopted by sensible, studious
men, and addicting myself instead to the consideration
of those parts which they generally
neglect. I have taken cats and dogs as characters,
not as mammalia: I have looked at
them,—not with reference to the number of
teeth in their head or the electricity in their
backs—but in their social, picturesque, quaint,
eccentric character. I wish to treat of cats
and dogs, not in a zoological light—not in a
mutton-pie light, but simply as characters, for
characteristic they decidedly are, and in a
very eminent degree.

I have less to say about cats than
dogs,  The former have less characters
than the latter; besides, I do not like
them so well as dogs.  There is to me
something inexpressibly sly, slowly cruel,
patiently treacherous, in a cat. The stealthy
walk, the velvet paw with the sharp fangs
beneath, the low hypocritical purr, the sudden
noiseless leaps on to high places,—the
blinking eye, the shadowy, slow-moving gestures
—ugh! I know cats that give me the horrors.

Cats, generally speaking, are proud in
their disposition, refusing to associate with
strangers, repudiating familiarity, daintily
turning up their noses at cats'-meat, bones,
and the like, that dogs would be glad to get;
there is a chilling haughtiness about them,
even to persons they have known for years,
exceedingly repulsive and disgusting. You
may play with them, you may fondle them,
you may stroke their backs and scratch their
heads, and call them "poor pussey!" but
beware! Sometimes they will arch their
backs, and purr, and seemingly respond with
gratitude to your caresses; but at other
times a hair stroked the wrong way, a
particularly tender part of the skull inadvertently
touched while scratching, and all the
soft complaisance, purring, back-arching of
Puss vanishes. She becomes a fury, a fiend.
Prompt as the stiletto of an Italian brigand
to quit its sheath, so prompt are her steel-like
claws to quit their velvet sheathing,—or,
to use another, and perhaps apter simile, as
prompt as that hideous instrument of torture,
the cupping-machine of the surgeon-dentist
is to quit its tortoiseshell case, and drive into
your flesh its bristling hedge of bayonet-like
lancets. The kitten is innocent and
sportive, you will say, and will play with a
slipper, a ball of cotton, a glove, quite in an
arcadian and unsophisticated manner. True,
but young tiger-cubs are playful, young
leopards are playful. You may see them in
their cage at the Zoological Gardens, gambolling,
romping, playfully sprawling on their
backs on the floor, with their feet turned
upwards, wide apart, as that famous,
never-to-be-surpassed leopard does, which is
tearing the vine-leaves in Sir Peter Paul
Rubens's picture of Peace and War. Yet,
for all the playfulness of the tiger and
leopard cubs, do you think when they