ID I know Sam Foote?" said the bar-keeper. "Well! I should smile! Why I knew Sam from the time that he was three years old. We were like two brothers. There wasn't hardly a day chat we didn't fight, and I'm free to say that Sam generally had the best of it. I was his best man, as you might say, the first time he was divorced. I sat alongside of him in the court-room, and sort of braced him up, and after the thing was over I had him and his late lady to a bang-up divorce supper, and I never saw two people enjoy a supper more than they did. Sam was a white man all the way through, but he wasn't a practical man. He was full of ideas, but they were all bad, or at any rate they turned out bad when he tried to carry them out. Did ever you hear about his Catorium? It was a good scheme in some respects, but Sam made a most everlasting muddle of it.
He was living in Chicago at the time, not two blocks from here, and one day he came to me and says, "I've struck it this time. Before the year is out I shall be a rich man, and you and I will take a trip to Yurrup at my expense, and call on every king and emperor in the business."
"What's your little game?" says I. "Is it anything that you want to keep quiet?"
"Not at all," says he, "and if it was I could trust you. Here's the whole scheme, and I don't think that you or anybody else will say that it aint practical.
"I've been looking into the statistics of Chicago lately, and I calculate that there are on an average five thousand families that go into the country every summer from the first of July till the first of October. Now it is safe to say that at least three-fourths of these families keep a cat, and most of them think a heap of it. What troubles them is how to dispose of their cats while they are in the country. They can't leave the cats to starve, and they can't take them with them. The consequence is that when a family owning a pet cat goes into the country, somebody has got to be left behind in the house to look after the cat. Of course this costs money, and is a risk besides, for when you leave a caretaker in your house you can never feel sure that the caretaker won't invite every burglar in Chicago to supper the first night you are out of town. My own idea is that, besides these five thousand families that go into the country, there are at least a thousand more that stay at home all summer, just because they can't make up their minds to leave their cats behind them."
"I aint denying what you say," said I, "but I don't see yet how you are going to make money out of cats."
"It's this way," says Sam; "I'm going to open a Catorium, where cats will be boarded during the summer months."
"Where did you get that name?" says I.
"I got it in the Zoological Garden. The place where they keep the carnivorous animals is called the Carnivorium. Similarly a place where cats are kept ought to be called a Catorium. There is nothing like giving a thing a scientific name. People will send cats to a Catoriutn who wouldn't dream of sending them to a plain Cat's Home.
"What I mean to do is this. I've hired the old skating-rink in Three-hundred-and-First Street—the one that has been condemned by the authorities, and is to be torn down next spring. I've got it for six months at a rent of fifty dollars, and it will hold a good two thousand cats. I'm going to advertise in all the papers that I'll take cats to board at the rate of fifty cents, a week, and give them the best of care.
"Cats supplied with Pure Milk and Wholesome Meat! Mice for Mental Relaxation, and Sparrows for Sport! Morals strictly attended to! Make your Holidays successful by making your Cats Happy!" That's the way the advertisement reads, and I think it's about as attractive as any advertisement you ever came across.