class of an object with a singleton method ...

On p356 (PDF, v5.0), on the section on Singletons, book introduces this snippet:

animal = "cat" 
def animal.speak
  puts "The #{self} says miaow" 
end

Ruby makes this singleton class the class of the "cat" 
object and makes String (which was the
original class of "cat") the superclass of the singleton 
class.

But I find that animal.class is still String and not the anonymous class. How do I access the anon class that defines this method speak?

Ruby hides the singleton class from you when you ask an object for it’s class. But you can get it using animal.singleton_class