“A little nervous!” interrupted the Doctor, “why he would be as crazy with the hypo as a March hare.  He would insist that he was going to die, or to the almshouse.  He has made two or three dozen wills, to my certain knowledge, under the firm conviction that he would be in the ground in a week.  A little nervous, indeed!”

“Well,” said Smith, “we won’t quarrel about the degree of my nervousness.  But in regard to what I was going to say about cats.  Some years ago I occupied a suite of rooms in the second story of a house rented by a widow lady, to whom I had been under some obligations in my boyhood, and whom my mother always regarded as her best friend.”  (Smith supported the excellent old lady in comfort for a decade, under pretence of boarding with her, ministering to the last years of her life with the care and affection of a son.) “The landlord of the premises was the owner of a block of twelve houses—­six on Pearl street, and six on Broadway, the lots meeting midway between the two streets.  On the rear of these lots are the out-houses, all under a continuous flat roof, some twelve feet high, twenty wide, and say a hundred and fifty feet long.  In the rear of the Broadway dwelling-houses, are one story tea-rooms, or third parlors, the roofs of which form a continuous platform, upon which you can step from the second story of the houses.”

“Well,” said the Doctor, “what of all that?”

“There’s a great deal of it,” Smith replied.  “I don’t pretend to know how many cats there were in the city of Albany.  Indeed, I never heard that they were included in the census.  I do not undertake to say that they all congregated nightly on the roofs of those out-houses.  But if there was a cat in the sixth ward, that didn’t have something to say on that roof every night, I should like to make its acquaintance.  I am against cats.  I regard them as treacherous, ungrateful animals, and as having very small moral developments generally.  I am against cat-terwauling, especially in the night season, when honest people have a right to their natural sleep.  I don’t like to be woke up, when rounding a pleasant dream, by their growling and screaming, spitting and whining, groaning and crying, and the hundred other nameless noises by which they frighten sleep from our pillows.

“Well, one night, it may have been one o’clock, or two, or three, I was awakened by the awfullest screaming and sputtering, growling and swearing, that ever startled a weary man from his slumbers.  I leaped out of bed under the impression that at least twenty little children had fallen into as many tubs of boiling water.  I threw open the window and stepped out upon the roof of the tea-room.  I don’t intend to exaggerate, but I honestly believe that there were less than three hundred cats over against me, on the roofs of the out-houses; each one of which had a tail bigger than a Bologna sausage, his back crooked up like an oxbow, and his great round eyes