JOHNNY REED’S CAT.
“Yes, cats are queer folk, sure enough, and often know more than a simple beast ought to by knowledge that’s rightly come by. There’s that cat there, you’ve been looking at, will stand at a door on its hind legs with its front paws on the handle trying like a Christian to open the door, and mewling in a manner that’s almost like talking. He’s a London cat, he is, being brought me by a cousin who lives there, and is called Gilpin, after, I’m told, a mayor who was christened the same. He’s a knowing cat, sure enough; but it’s not the London cats that are cleverer than the country ones. Who knows, he may be a relative of Johnny Reed’s own tom-cat himself.”
“And who was Johnny Reed? and what was there remarkable about his cat?”
“Have you never heard tell of Johnny Reed’s cat? It’s an old tale they have in the north country, and it’s true enough, though folk may not believe it in these days when the Bible’s not gospel enough for some of them. I’ve heard my father often tell the story, and he came from Newcastle way, which is the very part where Johnny Reed used to live, being a parish sexton in a village not far away.
“Well, Johnny Reed was the sexton, as I’ve already said, and he and his wife kept a cat, a well enough behaved creature, sure enough, and a beast as he had no fault to set on, saving a few of the tricks which all cats play at times, and which seem born in the blood of the creatures. It was all black except one white paw, and seemed as honest and decent a beast as could be, and Tom would as soon have suspected it of being any more than it really seemed to be as he would one of his own children themselves, like many other folk, perhaps, who, may be, have cats of the same kind, little thinking it.
“Well, the cat had been with him some years when a strange thing occurred.
“One night Johnny was going home late from the churchyard, where he had been digging a grave for a person who had died on a sudden, throwing the grave on Johnny’s hands unexpectedly, so that he had to stop working at it by the light of a lantern to have it ready for the next day’s burying. Well, having finished his work, and having put his tools in the shed in a corner of the yard, and having locked them up safe, he began to walk home pretty brisk, thinking would his wife be up and have a bit of fire for him, for the night was cold, a keen wind blowing over the fields.
“He hadn’t gone far before he comes to a gate at the roadside, and there seemed to be a strange shadow about it, in which Johnny saw, as it might be, a lot of little gleaming fires dancing about, while some stood steady, just like flashes of light from little windows in buildings all on fire inside. Says Johnny to himself, for he was not a man to be easily frightened, being accustomed by his calling to face things which might upset other folk—
“‘Hullo! What’s here? Here’s a thing I never saw before,’ and with that he walks straight up to the gate, while the shadow got deeper and the fires brighter the nearer he came to it.