Now, gentle reader, again observe, that though we have now described, _con amore_, a most cruel case of cat-killing, in which we certainly did play a most aggravated part some Sixty Years since, far indeed are we from recommending such wanton barbarity to the rising generation. We are not inditing a homily on humanity to animals, nor have we been appointed to succeed the Rev. Dr Somerville of Currie, the great Patentee of the Safety Double Bloody Barrel, to preach the annual Gibsonian sermon on that subject--we are simply stating certain matters of fact, illustrative of the rise and progress of the love of pastime in the soul, and leave our readers to draw the moral. But may we be permitted to say, that the naughtiest schoolboys often make the most pious men; that it does not follow, according to the wise saws and modern instances of prophetic old women of both sexes, that he who in boyhood has worried a cat with terriers, will, in manhood, commit murder on one of his own species; or that peccadilloes are the progenitors of capital crimes. Nature allows to growing lads a certain range of wickedness, _sans peur et sans reproche_. She seems, indeed, to whistle into their ear, to mock ancient females--to laugh at Quakers--to make mouths at a decent man and his wife riding double to church--the matron's thick legs ludicrously bobbing from the pillion, kept firm on Dobbin's rump by her bottom, "_ponderibus librata suis_,"--to tip the wink to young women during sermon on Sunday--and on Saturday, most impertinently to kiss them, whether they will or no, on high-road or by-path--and to perpetrate many other little nameless enormities.