I hastened to obey, merely asking parenthetically, “On cats?”
“On cats,” was the reply.
“Far away in sunny Greece,” continued the little man, “484 years before the birth of Christ, and on a beautiful morning, when all nature looked fresh and gay, a fair and lovely girl might have been seen hastening—”
“Ah!” said I, “this will be interesting; heave round, ancient cockalorum.”
“Hastening, sir, for the midwife. If the day was bright and fine, still more enchanting was the scenery, for it was the suburbs of the city of Halicarnassus, now called Budron, in the province of Caria. And that morning, exactly at ten o’clock, was born into the world a sweet little babe, afterwards the great and illustrious Herodotus.
“He wrote—indeed I may say sang, for his whole history is one noble poem—of the ancient Medes and Assyrians, and of the long line of Persia’s kings; he sang the wars of Cyrus, and told the sad tale of the kingdom of Lydia, and he sung the wars of gallant Darius and the Scythians, and told of conquering Cambyses, and Egypt of the olden time; and last, but not least, sir, he wrote on Cats and Cat-life.
“Ay, sir, in Egypt in the good old times, pussy had her rights, had appreciation, had justice. If a boy had killed a cat with a stone, or a man murdered her with a dog, Lynch law would have been had on the very spot. Pussy was gently tended, cared for, and loved even to veneration, while alive, and after death, her little body had the honours of embalmment; her virtues were written on monumental tablets, and her memory cherished by the bereaved owners until the day of their death. In Turkey too, and especially in Persia, cats have been household pets as far back as man can remember. In many places hospitals were built for them, something after the style and fashion of your modern cat-homes; and in so great esteem was she held, that bloody riots and war itself were not unfrequently the result of injury done, or insult offered to pussy. In the quaint but beautiful love-songs of ancient Persia, so full of splendid imagery, do we not often find the poet comparing the bright eyes of his mistress to those of gentle pussy, or her winning ways to those of the domestic cat?”
“The origin of the D. C. did you say, sir?”
“There is the tiger of Bengal, which you have seen at a distance—preferring no nearer acquaintance. There is the tiger-cat, or spotted leopard of Central Africa, which—I will do you the justice to say—you have shot; and there is the kolo-kolo of Guiana—”
“Isn’t,” insinuated I, “one kolo enough for a cat?”