The Cheshire cat.  From Good Housekeeping, 1908.

INSTRUCTIONS: Click to see what happens next. From Le Rire, 1903.

From English Illustrated, 1896.  This should also be of interest: How to Be Your Own Cat.

"Good types of long-haired cats opposite in character," from Pearson's, 1898.  This should also be of interest: How to Be Your Own Cat.

"Who says fight?"  From 1918.

"Not dead but weary," 1881.

Long-term ex-readers of ours will recall that we love interpreting rows of section-break dots and asterisks as illustrations for the text above or below them.  (In fact, we published an entire book of such interpretations, Annotated Ellipses: Revealing A Hidden Dot-To-Dot Game Within A Novelist's Eccentric Punctuation).  But here's an example of the very opposite.  The narrator experiences a roadside accident and sees fifty million stars, then notes that the row of asterisks does not represent said stars but rather a period of unconsicousness.  From Pearson's, 1904.

"Did you see me get the best of him?"  From 1881.

From Historie du Petit Nègre Sambo by Helen Bannerman, 1921.

From Bannertail by Ernest Thompson Seton, 1922.

From Light: A Journal of Social Wircester and Her Neighbors, 1890.

From Incidents and Adventures in Rebeldom by George W. Darby, 1899.

From the Arsenal Cannon yearbook of Arsenal Technical High School, 1920.  See How to Hoodoo Hack a Yearbook.

Before the smiling Cheshire cat from Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (1865) there was this laughing cat in Christmas Cheer by Angus Reach, James Hannay and Albert Smith, 1856.