mark twain and a kitten

I urged that kings were dangerous. He said, then have cats.
He was sure that a royal family of cats would answer every purpose. They would be as useful as any other royal family, they would know as much, they would have the same virtues and the same treacheries, the same disposition to get up shindies with other royal cats, they would be laughably vain and absurd and never know it, they would be wholly inexpensive, finally, they would have as sound a divine right as any other royal house. ...from A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court

public domain, originally the new york times

Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens, as we know) is famed among other things for his love of cats. I happened upon this 1907 photo and found it cheered me up a great deal on a Monday morning, as did this page of Twain quotes from which I nicked the passage above. Plus, the website for the Mark Twain House in Connecticut has a fun word search for some of his cats' names - can you find "Famine," "Pestilence" and "Sourmash"?