The water used for drinking in our house, for making tea, and for lesser washing purposes, is kept in large white china tubs, decorated with paintings representing blue fish borne along by a swift current through distorted rushes. In order to keep them cool, the tubs are kept out of doors on Madame Prune’s roof, at a place where we can, from the top of our projecting balcony, easily reach them by stretching out an arm. A real godsend for all the thirsty cats in the neighborhood, on warm summer nights, is this corner of the roof with our gayly painted tubs, and it proves a delightful trysting-place for them, after all their caterwauling and long solitary rambles on the tops of the walls.

I had thought it my duty to warn Yves the first time he wished to drink this water.

“Oh!” he replied, rather surprised, “cats, do you say? But they are not dirty!”

On this point Chrysanthème and I agree with him: we do not consider cats unclean animals, and we do not object to drink after them.

Yves considers Chrysanthème much in the same light. “She is not dirty, either,” he says; and he willingly drinks after her, out of the same cup, putting her in the same category with the cats.

These china tubs are one of the daily preoccupations of our household: in the evening, when we return from our walk, after the clamber up, which makes us thirsty, and Madame L’Heure’s waffles, which we have been eating to beguile the way, we always find them ............