“You’re like the rest,” he shouted; and, seizing the unhappy puss, he dashed her with all his force over the banisters. The poor creature was not killed outright; but was so severely wounded that she died in three hours. Although bleeding all the time, and evidently in great pain, never a cry escaped her, only a low moaning mew. For one moment only she brightened up a little, when her hard-hearted, but still loved master came in to see her before she expired. She even tried to sing, apparently anxious to show she had forgiven him; and actually died licking his hands.
I know the case of an old gentleman, who was extremely fond of a very pretty cat he had; and pussy loved her master dearly. Indeed, cats seem always particularly partial to the aged. They love to sit beside them at the fireside, and soothe them with their low, murmuring song; for they seem to know by instinct that age is but a second childhood, with only the grave beyond. The gentleman in question died at an advanced age. Every one missed and mourned him, but none so sincerely as pussy. She never sung again, and nothing could induce her to leave his sitting-room. She would sit and gaze for hours at the vacant arm-chair, as if she couldn’t understand why her eyes no longer beheld him she loved. This went on for a fortnight; then one morning poor pussy was found lying stiff and dead on the hearth-rug. She had died of grief.
I may close this chapter with another similar instance of pussy’s affection for a kind master.
He was an old fiddler, who dwelt all alone in a cottage on a moor. He had lived to see friend after friend laid under the sod, and now he had none on earth to care for him. Ah! yes; he had one friend—his cat. This little pet cheered him in many a lonely hour; and when sickness came at last, she never left his bedside. Then he died. She sat like a dazed creature as she saw him lifted and placed in his coffin, and she followed the loved remains to their long home, and saw where they laid him. She never left that churchyard living. For three days she sat on the grave; and it would have made your heart bleed, reader, to have heard her pitiful cries.
“Oh!” she seemed to say to every passerby, “he is here—my master is here with all this load of earth on his breast. Will no one come and help me?”
On a cold sleety morning in November she was found stretched on the grave—in a hole she had scraped—dead.
Has this gentle and affectionate creature met her master? Is there no hereafter for pussy? The sun of her sinless life set in sorrow.
“Alas for love! if this be all,
And nought beyond an earth.”