He is a common grey kitten; but he is the last of a large family, and his mother is devoted to him, and takes great pains about his education. Now that he can run about, his mother fetches indoors little field-mice for him, and baby rats from the stable; and so the kitten is quickly learning the trade of all his tribe. But mother was digesting last night (11/6/09) and would not run about with him, would only flick her tail; and chasing mother’s tail became gradually monotonous for a kitten that had had a field-mouse in his paws, to say nothing of a baby rat.

So he went and spoke to the big fat frog that was sitting in the corner of the dining-room, face to the wall, like a pupil at school sent to stand in the corner as a punishment. Only, the frog was not being punished. He was catching flies. He looked round at the kitten coming near and trying to draw attention. He is a pot-bellied frog, of elderly look, so that his leaping [114] seems out of character. On this occasion, however, his deportment was unimpeachable. He looked at the kitten earnestly, but never spoke, moving nothing but his head, as he turned it round to see him. He gazed at the importunate little cat, as once a gaitered bishop gazed at a newspaper-boy who wanted to speak to him, but seemed unlikely to be polite. “I wish no ill to you, but please leave me alone.” That was what the frog’s look seemed to say; but he uttered no sound. Perhaps he thought that talking might disturb the flies he was catching, just as the gentle angler sometimes prays for silence, lest a whisper be heard by the fish.

The kitten took the hint and jumped upon a chair and thence to the table, and walked across it towards me. He is fond of me; that is to say, he sometimes comes to me when he has nothing else to do or wants something. But on the way across the table he saw what seemed more interesting. The brass Egyptian finger-bowl caught his eye, and he surveyed it and its doily. He had passed it unconcerned a few minutes before, but that was when preoccupied about the frog. On this occasion, after an attentive survey of the finger-bowl, he put out his paw and tried to push it sideways. It did not move. He tried a spring [115] and a push, to add momentum to his muscle; and so he shook it a little.

He raised himself to his full height and looked and beheld something inside it, moving! Then he became excited.

When you try to think like a cat, you must begin by realising that he has fewer categories than Aristotle. The universe is, in his mind, divided into—himself and other things not-himself, which is exactly the feline counterpart of Hegel &Co.’s Ego and Non-Ego; but, having to find a living, the cat has passed as far beyond the Hegelian stage as the Germans themselves have done since Hegel died. He classifies things not-himself into the Eatable and the Not-Eatable; and again, a cross-division, into what he fears and what he does not fear; and thirdly, another cross-division, he distinguishes things that move from things that do not move. Few hunting animals are long of learning that last distinction; and yet to know that motionless things escape the eye is one of the first lessons that scouts have to be taught. The kitten knew it. He flopped down motionless a while, as soon as he saw something moving inside the bowl; but men who have been miseducated into believing without observing, whose minds have been constricted by Greek [116] grammars and the rest, as the feet of Chinese ladies are constricted by bandages, men of bandaged brains, in short, still need to be taught that in their maturity. Better late than never!

Stealthily the kitten now approached the bowl and tried in vain to jerk out what was inside. The bowl was too heavy for him. He crept round and round it, and endeavoured to move it by pulling the tablecloth, but failed again. Then he sat down at a distance, with his head between his paws, and watched it and considered, concentrating his intellect upon it, exactly as a boy sits down, with his arms round his head to puzzle out a thing, retiring into himself, so that distracting sights and sounds be held aloof, and only the problem to be solved find access to his brain. It is an excellent thing to make a camera obscura of your skull in that way at times. I have watched a great inventor doing it; and with like admiration I now watched the kitten. No apology is needed to my Brahman friends for mentioning that this concentration is what they call “Yoga,” described as “a discipline whereby the powers in man are to be so trained that they will attain their utmost development, and will realise and respond to the subtlest and minutest influences which bear on him from outside.” Such is ever [117] the way of the wise; and it may be attempted by the simple too, if they are sincere. It is conceit and affectation that make the fool. The kitten had no weakness of that kind. So he meditated to some purpose; for he saw what to do.

He put out his paw and tugged the doily. Hurrah! The bowl moved briskly. The hunt was up now at the fifth tug the water flew out. The triumphant kitten darted round the bowl to catch his prey and found nothing. The tablecloth was wet; but how could he connect the wetness of the tablecloth with the thing that had leapt from the bowl?

I tried to console him with milk, but he was transported beyond the reach of sordid comforting. Besides, he was not hungry. He returned again and again to investigate the matter, till he was tired. Where had the thing gone to? He never guessed, and I could not tell him. Poor little puss! For him, as for humanity, the ocean of mystery, on which all things swim, is very close at times.