and went around to the back of the house to the pine-tree, and was up
the trunk with a wild scramble, and in through his little window, and
down through the trap to the room, and the man was gone.

The Cat cried again--that cry of the animal for human companionship
which is one of the sad notes of the world; he looked in all the
corners; he sprang to the chair at the window and looked out; but no one
came. The man was gone and he never came again.

The Cat ate his mouse out on the turf beside the house; the rabbit and
the partridge he carried painfully into the house, but the man did not
come to share them. Finally, in the course of a day or two, he ate them
up himself; then he slept a long time on the bed, and when he waked the
man was not there.

Then the Cat went forth to his hunting-grounds again, and came home at
night with a plump bird, reasoning with his tireless persistency in
expectancy that the man would be there; and there was a light in the
window, and when he cried his old master opened the door and let him in.

His master had strong comradeship with the Cat, but not affection. He
never patted him like that gentler outcast, but he had a pride in him
and an anxiety for his welfare, though he had left him alone all winter
without scruple. He feared lest some misfortune might have come to the
Cat, though he was so large of his kind, and a mighty hunter. Therefore,
when he saw him at the door in all the glory of his glossy winter coat,
his white breast and face shining like snow in the sun, his own face lit
up with welcome, and the Cat embraced his feet with his sinuous body
vibrant with rejoicing purrs.

The Cat had his bird to himself, for his master had his own supper
already cooking on the stove. After supper the Cat's master took his
pipe, and sought a small store of tobacco which he had left in his hut
over winter. He had thought often of it; that and the Cat seemed
something to come home to in the spring. But the tobacco was gone; not a
dust left. The man swore a little in a grim monotone, which made the
profanity lose its customary effect. He had been, and was, a hard
drinker; he had knocked about the world until the marks of its sharp
corners were on his very soul, which was thereby calloused, until his
very sensibility to loss was dulled. He was a very old man.

He searched for the tobacco with a sort of dull combativeness of
persistency; then he stared with stupid wonder around the room. Suddenly
many features struck him as being changed. Another stove-lid was broken;
an old piece of carpet was tacked up over a window to keep out the cold;
his fire-wood was gone. He looked and there was no oil left in his can.
He looked at the coverings on his bed; he took them up, and again he
made that strange remonstrant noise in his throat. Then he looked again
for his tobacco.

Finally he gave it up. He sat down beside the fire, for May in the
mountains is cold; he held his empty pipe in his mouth, his rough
forehead knitted, and he and the Cat looked at each other across that
impassable barrier of silence which has been set between man and beast
from the creation of the world.

                                             MARY E. WILKINS FREEMAN.




ZUT


Side by side, on the avenue de la Grande Armйe, stand the йpicerie of
Jean-Baptiste Caille and the salle de coiffure of Hippolyte Sergeot, and
between these two there is a great gulf fixed, the which has come to be
through the acerbity of Alexandrine Caille (according to Espйrance
Sergeot), though the duplicity of Espйrance Sergeot (according to
Alexandrine Caille). But the veritable root of all evil is Zut, and Zut
sits smiling in Jean-Baptiste's doorway, and cares naught for anything
in the world, save the sunlight and her midday meal.

When Hippolyte found himself in a position to purchase the salle de
coiffure, he gave evidence of marked acumen by uniting himself in the
holy--and civil--bonds of matrimony with the retiring patron's daughter,
whose dot ran into the coveted five figures, and whose heart, said
Hippolyte, was as good as her face was pretty, which, even by the
unprejudiced, was acknowledged to be forcible commendation. The
installation of the new establishment was a nine days' wonder in the
quartier. It is a busy thoroughfare at its western end, is the avenue de
la Grande Armйe, crowded with bicyclists and with a multitude of
creatures fearfully and wonderfully clad, who do incomprehensible things
in connection with motor-carriages. Also there are big cafйs in plenty,
whose waiters must be smoothly shaven: and moreover, at the time when
Hippolyte came into his own, the porte Maillot station of the
Mйtropolitain had already pushed its entrйe and sortie up through the
soil, not a hundred metres from his door, where they stood like
atrocious yellow tulips, art nouveau, breathing people out and in by
thousands. There was no lack of possible custom. The problem was to turn
possible into probable, and probable into permanent; and here the seven
wits and the ten thousand francs of Espйrance came prominently to the
fore. She it was who sounded the progressive note, which is half the
secret of success.

"Pour attirer les gens," she said, with her arms akimbo, "il faut
d'abord les йpater."

In her creed all that was worth doing at all was worth doing gloriously.
So, under her guidance, Hippolyte journeyed from shop to shop in the
faubourg St. Antoine, and spent hours of impassioned argument with
carpenters and decorators. In the end, the salle de coiffure was
glorified by fresh paint without and within, and by the addition of a
long mirror in a gilt frame, and a complicated apparatus of gleaming
nickel-plate, which went by the imposing title of appareil antiseptique,
and the acquisition of which was duly proclaimed by a special placard
that swung at right angles to the door. The shop was rechristened, too,
and the black and white sign across its front which formerly bore the
simple inscription "Kilbert, Coiffeur," now blazoned abroad the vastly
more impressive legend "Salon Malakoff." The window shelves fairly
groaned beneath their burden of soaps, toilet waters, and perfumery, a
string of bright yellow sponges occupied each corner of the window,
and, through the agency of white enamel letters on the pane itself,
public attention was drawn to the apparently contradictory facts that
English was spoken and "schampoing" given within. Then Hippolyte engaged
two assistants, and clad them in white duck jackets, and his wife
fabricated a new blouse of blue silk, and seated herself behind the desk
with an engaging smile. The enterprise was fairly launched, and
experience was not slow in proving the theories of Espйrance to be well
founded. The quartier was йpatй from the start, and took with enthusiasm
the bait held forth. The affairs of the Salon Malakoff prospered
prodigiously.

But there is a serpent in every Eden, and in that of the Sergeot this
rфle was assumed by Alexandrine Caille. The worthy йpicier himself was
of too torpid a temperament to fall a victim to the gnawing tooth of
envy, but in the soul of his wife the launch, and, what was worse, the
immediate prosperity of the Salon Malakoff, bred dire resentment. Her
own establishment had grown grimy with the passage of time, and the
annual profits displayed a constant and disturbing tendency toward
complete evaporation, since the coming of the big cafйs, and the
resultant subversion of custom to the wholesale dealers. This persistent
narrowing of the former appreciable gap between purchase and selling
price rankled in Alexandrine's mind, but her misguided efforts to
maintain the percentage of profit by recourse to inferior qualities only
made bad worse, and, even as the Sergeot were steering the Salon
Malakoff forth upon the waters of prosperity, there were nightly
conferences in the household next door, at which impending ruin
presided, and exasperation sounded the keynote of every sentence. The
resplendent faзade of Hippolyte's establishment, the tide of custom
which poured into and out of his door, the loudly expressed admiration
of his ability and thrift, which greeted her ears on every side, and,
finally, the sight of Espйrance, fresh, smiling, and prosperous, behind
her little counter--all these were as gall and wormwood to Alexandrine,
brooding over her accumulating debts and her decreasing earnings, among
her dusty stacks of jars and boxes. Once she had called upon her
neighbour, somewhat for courtesy's sake, but more for curiosity's, and
since then the agreeable scent of violet and lilac perfumery dwelt
always in her memory, and mirages of scrupulously polished nickel and
glass hung always before her eyes. The air of her own shop was heavy
with the pungent odours of raw vegetables, cheeses, and dried fish, and
no brilliance redeemed the sardine and biscuit boxes which surrounded
her. Life became a bitter thing to Alexandrine Caille, for if nothing is
more gratifying than one's own success, surely nothing is less so than
that of one's neighbour. Moreover, her visit had never been returned,
and this again was fuel for her rage.

But the sharpest thorn in her flesh--and even in that of her phlegmatic
husband--was the base desertion to the enemy's camp of Abel Flique. In
the days when Madame Caille was unmarried, and when her ninety kilos
were fifty still, Abel had been youngest commis in the very shop over
which she now held sway, and the most devoted suitor in all her train.
Even after his prowess in the black days of '71 had won him the
attention of the civil authorities, and a grateful municipality had
transformed the grocer-soldier into a guardian of law and order, he
still hung upon the favour of his heart's first love, and only gave up
the struggle when Jean-Baptiste bore off the prize and enthroned her in
state as presiding genius of his newly acquired йpicerie. Later, an
unwittingly kindly prefect had transferred Abel to the seventeenth
arrondissement, and so the old friendship was picked up where it had
been dropped, and the ruddy-faced agent found it both convenient and
agreeable to drop in frequently at Madame Caille's on his way home, and
exchange a few words of reminiscence or banter for a box of sardines or
a minute package of tea. But, with the deterioration in his old friends'
wares, and the almost simultaneous appearance of the Salon Malakoff, his
loyalty wavered. Flique sampled the advantages of Hippolyte's
establishment, and, being won over thereby, returned again and again.
His hearty laugh came to be heard almost daily in the salle de coiffure,
and because he was a brave homme and a good customer, who did not stand
upon a question of a few sous, but allowed Hippolyte to work his will,
and trim and curl and perfume him to his heart's content, there was
always a welcome for him, and a smile from Madame Sergeot, and
occasionally a little present of brillantine or perfumery, for
friendship's sake, and because it is well to have the good-will of the
all-powerful police.

From her window Madame Caille observed the comings and goings of Abel
with a resentful eye. It was rarely now that he glanced into the
йpicerie as he passed, and still more rarely that he greeted his former
flame with a stiff nod. Once she had hailed him from the doorway,
sardines in hand, but he had replied that he was pressed for time, and
had passed rapidly on. Then indeed did blackness descend upon the soul
of Alexandrine, and in her deepest consciousness she vowed to have
revenge. Neither the occasion nor the method was as yet clear to her,
but she pursed her lips ominously, and bided her time.

In the existence of Madame Caille there was one emphatic consolation for
all misfortunes, the which was none other than Zut, a white angora cat
of surpassing beauty and prodigious size. She had come into
Alexandrine's possession as a kitten, and, what with much eating and an
inherent distaste for exercise, had attained her present proportions and
her superb air of unconcern.