it is their nature and so forth.  They even suggest that a cat is no more cruel in eating robin than we are cruel ourselves in eating chicken.  This seems to me to be quibbling.  In the first place, there is an immense difference between a robin and a chicken.  In the second place, we are willing to share our chicken with the cat—­at least, we are willing to share the skin and such of the bones as are not required for soup.  Besides, a cat has not the same need of delicacies as a human being.  It can eat, and even digest, anything.  It can eat the black skin of filleted plaice.  It can eat the bits of gristle that people leave on the side of their plates.  It can eat boiled cod.  It can eat New Zealand mutton.  There is no reason why an animal with so undiscriminating a palate should demand song-birds for its food, when even human beings, who are fairly unscrupulous eaters, have agreed in some measure to abstain from them.  On reflection, however, I doubt if it is his appetite for birds that makes the cat with the yellow eyes feel guilty.  If you were able to talk to him in his own language, and formulate your accusations against him as a bird-eater, he would probably be merely puzzled and look on you as a crank.  If you pursued the argument and compelled him to moralise his position, he would, I fancy, explain that the birds were very wicked creatures and that their cruelties to the worms and the insects were more than flesh and blood could stand.  He would work himself up into a generous idealisation of himself as the guardian of law and order amid the bloody strife of the cabbage-patch—­the preserver of the balance of nature.  If cats were as clever as we, they would compile an atrocities blue-book about worms.  Alas, poor thrush, with how bedraggled a reputation you would come through such an exposure!  With how Hunnish a tread you would be depicted treading the lawn, sparing neither age nor sex, seizing the infant worm as it puts out its head to take its first bewildered peep at the rolling sun!  Cats could write sonnets on such a theme....  Then there is that other beautiful potential poem, The Cry of the Snail....  How tender-hearted cats are!  Their sympathy seems to be all but universal, always on the look out for an object, ready to extend itself anywhere where it is needed, except, as is but human, to their victims.  Yellow eyes or not, I begin to be persuaded that the cat next door is a noble fellow.  It may well be that his look as I pass is a look not of fear but of repulsion.  He has seen me going out among the worms with a sharp—­no, not a very sharp—­spade, and regards me as no better than an ogre.  If I could only explain to him!  But I shall never be able to do so.  He could no more appreciate my point of view about worms than I can appreciate his about robins.  Luckily, we both eat chicken.  This may ultimately help us to understand one another.