He lapped his milk all right.  I did not know what else to give him.  I asked Amelie what she gave hers.  She said “soup made out of bread and drippings.”  That was a new idea.  But Amelie’s cats looked all right.  So I made the same kind of soup for Khaki.  Not he!  He turned his back on it.  Then Amelie suggested bread in his milk.  I tried that.  He lapped the milk, but left the bread.  I was rather in despair.  He looked too thin.  Amelie suggested that he was a thin kind of a cat.  I did not want a thin kind of a cat.  I wanted a roly-poly cat.

One day I was eating a dry biscuit at tea time.  He came and stood beside me, and I offered him a piece.  He accepted it.  So, after that, I gave him biscuit and milk.  He used to sit beside his saucer, lap up his milk, and then pick up the pieces of biscuit with his paw and eat them.  This got to be his first show trick.  Everyone came to see Khaki eat “with his fingers.”

All Amelie’s efforts to induce him to adopt the diet of all the other cats in Huiry failed.  Finally I said:  “What does he want, Amelie?  What do cats, who will not eat soup, eat?”

Reluctantly I got it—­“Liver.”

Well, I should think he did.  He eats it twice a day.

Up to that time he had never talked even cat language.  He had never meowed since the day he presented himself at Amelie’s and asked for sanctuary.

But we have had, from the beginning, a few collisions of will-power.  The first few weeks that he was a guest in my house, I was terribly flattered because he never wanted to sleep anywhere but on my knees.  He did not squirm round as Amelie said kittens usually did.  He never climbed on my shoulders and rubbed against my face.  He simply jumped up in my lap, turned round once, lay down, and lay perfectly still.  If I got up, I had to put him in my chair, soothe him a bit, as you would a baby, if I expected him to stay, but, even then, nine times out of ten, as soon as I was settled in another chair, he followed, and climbed into my lap.

Now things that are flattering finally pall.  I began to guess that it was his comfort, not his love for me, that controlled him.  Well—­it is the old story.

But the night question was the hardest.  He had a basket.  He had a cushion.  I have the country habit of going to bed with the chickens.  The cat came near changing all that.  I used to let him go to sleep in my lap.  I used to put him in his basket by the table with all the care that you would put a baby.  Then I made a dash for upstairs and closed the doors.  Ha! ha!  In two minutes he was scratching at the door.  I let him scratch.  “He must be disciplined,” I said.  There was a cushion at the door, and finally he would settle’ down and in the morning he was there when I woke.  “He will learn,” I said.  H’m!