“If ye mane to write a preface to your book, sure you must put it in the end entoirely.”
Such was the advice an Irish friend gave me, when I talked of an introductory chapter to the present work on cats. I think it was a good one. Whether it be owing to our style of living now-a-days, which tends more to the development of brain than muscle; or whether it be, as Darwin says, that we really are descended from the ape, and, as the years roll on, are losing that essentially animal virtue—patience; certainly it is true that we cannot tolerate prefaces, preludes, and long graces before meat, as our grandfathers did. A preface, like Curaçoa—and—B, before dinner, ought to be short and sweet: something[Pg 2] merely to give an edge to appetite, or it had as well be put in the “end entoirely,” or better still, in the fire.
I presume, then, the reader is fond of the domestic cat; if only for the simple reason that God made it. Yes; God made it, and man mars it. Pussy is an ill-used, much persecuted, little understood, and greatly slandered animal. It is with the view, therefore, of gaining for our little fireside friend a greater meed of justice than she has hitherto obtained, of removing the ban under which she mostly lives, and making her life a more pleasant and happy one, that the following pages are written; and I shall deem it a blessing if I am in any way successful. I have tried to paint pussy just as she is, without the aid of “putty and varnish;” and I have been at no small pains to prove the authenticity of the various anecdotes, and can assure the reader that they are all strictly true.
