“Certainly not,” cried the old gentleman; “I tell you I never give to beggars at all.” But the old man did not move.
“Then,” he said, “give me some of the broken victuals from your table, that I may creep into a doorway and eat a Christmas dinner there.”
“I will give you nothing,” cried the old gentleman, stamping his foot. “Go away. Go away at once, or I shall send for the policeman to take you away.”
The old beggar-man put on his hat and turned quietly away, but what the old gentleman thought was very odd was, that instead of seeming distressed he was laughing merrily, and then he looked back at the window, and called out some words, but they were in a foreign tongue, and the old gentleman could not understand them. So he returned to his comfortable arm-chair by the fire, still murmuring angrily that beggars ought not to be allowed to be in the streets.
Next morning the snow fell more thickly than ever, and the streets were almost impassable, but it did not trouble the old gentleman, for he knew he need not go out and get wet or cold. But in the morning when he came down to breakfast, to his great surprise there was a cat on the hearthrug in front of the fire, looking into it, and blinking lazily. Now the old gentleman had never had any animal in his house before, and he at once went to it and said “Shoo-shoo!” and tried to turn it out. But the cat did not move, and when the old gentleman looked at it nearer, he could not help admiring it very much. It was a very large cat, grey and black, and had extremely long soft hair, and a thick soft ruff round its neck. Moreover, it looked very well fed and cared for, and as if it had always lived in comfortable places. Somehow it seemed to the old gentleman to suit the room and the rug and the fire, and to make the whole place look more prosperous and cosy even than it had done before.
“A fine creature! a very handsome cat!” he said to himself; “I should really think that a reward would be offered for such an animal, as it has evidently been well looked after and fed, so it would be a pity to turn it away in a hurry.”
One thing struck him as very funny about the cat, and that was that though the ground was deep in snow and slush outside, the cat was quite dry, and its fur looked as if it had just been combed and brushed. The old gentleman called to his cook and asked if she knew how the cat had come in, but she declared she had not seen it before, and said she believed it must have come down the chimney as all the doors and windows had been shut and bolted. However, there it was, and when his own breakfast was finished the old gentleman gave it a large saucer of milk, which it lapped up not greedily or in a hurry, but as if it were quite used to good food and had had plenty of it always.
“It really is a very handsome animal, and most uncommon,” said the old gentleman, “I shall keep it awhile and look out for the reward;” but though he looked at all the notices in the street and in the newspapers, the old gentleman could see no notice about a reward being offered for a grey and black cat, so it stayed on with him from day to day.
Every day the cat seemed to his master to grow handsomer and handsomer. The old gentleman never loved anything but himself, but he began to take a sort of interest in the strange cat, and to wonder what sort it was—if it was a Persian or a Siamese, or some curious new sort of which he had never heard. He liked the sound of its lazy contented purring after its food, which seemed to speak of nothing but comfort and affluence. So the cat remained on till nearly a year had passed away.
It was not very long before Christmas that an acquaintance of the old gentleman’s came to his rooms on business. He knew a great deal about all sorts of animals and loved them for their own sakes, but of course he had never talked to the old gentleman about them, because he knew he did not love anything. But when he saw the grey cat, he said at once—