“All things, all, to them seemed superfluity, for Poverty was their sentinel. They had no neighbor by them, but ever against their narrow cabin gently floated up the sea.”
Cats, too, were valued pets in former days, and probably found such easy domesticity more to their tastes than the burdensome honors of Egypt. In fact, when the Egyptian cat was not living in sanctified seclusion as the friend and favorite of Pasht, she was apparently earning a laborious livelihood as a retriever, if we may trust a relic of Egyptian art in the British Museum, which shows us a magnificent animal carrying no less than three struggling wild fowls in her mouth and claws. But when Puss at last entered Greece and Rome, about the time of the Christian era, or perhaps a century or two earlier, it was simply as a plaything; and Mr. Pater in “Marius the Epicurean” describes very charmingly the snow-white beast brought by one of the guests to a Roman banquet, and purring its way among the wine-cups in response to caresses and coaxing words. Mrs. Graham R. Tomson, that most winning chronicler of the cat’s vicissitudes and triumphs, has also told us in graceful verse the history of a Greek lover who loses his mistress because he dares not bring her from Egypt one of these coveted and mysterious creatures:
“A little lion, small and dainty sweet,
(For such there be!)
With sea-grey eyes and softly stepping feet,
She prayed of me.
For this, through lands Egyptian far away
She bade me pass;
But, in an evil hour, I said her nay—
And now, alas!