Cats slither their way through a good deal of Twain's work. They are not always treated lovingly, though Twain himself loved them, as Barb noted. (A cat-eating horse appears in an early San Francisco piece.) The description of Tom feeding painkiller to his aunt's cat Peter in TOM SAWYER is, for me, one of the great Twain set pieces of comic writing. He seems to have named cats wonderfully. I've always treasured a pair of kittens, rather late in Mark's life, that he named Sackcloth and Ashes. Mark Coburn