As we entered the edge of the town that Sunday afternoon, we stopped at a cottage to get a drink of water.  The proprietor, a middle-aged man with a good face, asked us to sit down and rest.  His dame brought chairs, and we grouped ourselves in the shade of the trees by the door.  Mr. Smith —­that was not his name, but it will answer—­questioned us about ourselves and our country, and we answered him truthfully, as a general thing, and questioned him in return.  It was all very simple and pleasant and sociable.  Rural, too; for there was a pig and a small donkey and a hen anchored out, close at hand, by cords to their legs, on a spot that purported to be grassy.  Presently, a woman passed along, and although she coldly said nothing she changed the drift of our talk.  Said Smith: 

“She didn’t look this way, you noticed?  Well, she is our next neighbor on one side, and there’s another family that’s our next neighbors on the other side; but there’s a general coolness all around now, and we don’t speak.  Yet these three families, one generation and another, have lived here side by side and been as friendly as weavers for a hundred and fifty years, till about a year ago.”

“Why, what calamity could have been powerful enough to break up so old a friendship?”

“Well, it was too bad, but it couldn’t be helped.  It happened like this:  About a year or more ago, the rats got to pestering my place a good deal, and I set up a steel trap in my back yard.  Both of these neighbors run considerable to cats, and so I warned them about the trap, because their cats were pretty sociable around here nights, and they might get into trouble without my intending it.  Well, they shut up their cats for a while, but you know how it is with people; they got careless, and sure enough one night the trap took Mrs. Jones’s principal tomcat into camp and finished him up.  In the morning Mrs. Jones comes here with the corpse in her arms, and cries and takes on the same as if it was a child.  It was a cat by the name of Yelverton—­Hector G. Yelverton—­a troublesome old rip, with no more principle than an Injun, though you couldn’t make her believe it.  I said all a man could to comfort her, but no, nothing would do but I must pay for him.  Finally, I said I warn’t investing in cats now as much as I was, and with that she walked off in a huff, carrying the remains with her.  That closed our intercourse with the Joneses.  Mrs. Jones joined another church and took her tribe with her.  She said she would not hold fellowship with assassins.  Well, by and by comes Mrs. Brown’s turn—­she that went by here a minute ago.  She had a disgraceful old yellow cat that she thought as much of as if he was twins, and one night he tried that trap on his neck, and it fitted him so, and was so sort of satisfactory, that he laid down and curled up and stayed with it.  Such was the end of Sir John Baldwin.”

“Was that the name of the cat?”