From the chapter on cats:
"Of all people, the writer should regard the cat sympathetically, for when she was a baby of five months she was adopted by a cat. My self-elected foster-mother was Jenny, a handsome black and white cat, which at that time lost her first litter of kittens, through the attack of a savage cat from the woods. She was as Rachel crying for her children, when she seemed suddenly to comprehend that I, although larger than she, was an infant. She haunted my cradle, trying to give me milk from her own breasts; and later she brought half-killed mice and placed them enticingly in my cradle, coaxing me to play with them, a performance which pleased me much more than it did my real mother. Jenny always came to comfort me when I cried, rubbing against me, purring loudly, and licking me with her tongue in a way to drive mad the modern mother, wise as to the sources of children's internal parasites. This maternal attitude toward me lasted as long as Jenny lived, which was until I was nine years old. Never during those years did I lift my voice in wailing, that she did not come to comfort me; and even today I can remember how great that comfort was, especially when my naughtiness was the cause of my weeping, and when, therefore, I felt that the whole world, except Jenny, was against me."
Anna Botsford Comstock. Handbook of Nature-Study. 1911.
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