‘It is mine! the framework, the skeleton of it. Some fool has been at work upon it and taken out all the beauties of it! The burning fiery dialogue, the magnificent glowing descriptions, all are gone, and in their stead some ass has filled it all up with pulp!’
This was pleasant for me to hear. My blood boiled with indignation, but I was obliged to smother my rage and put on a sickly smile. ‘You must be mistaken,’ I said. ‘How could he possibly have got hold of your story?’
‘How? He must have got it from a man named Smith, to whom I sent it. Write? Yes, I have written ever since I was breeched! It is a disease with me; I can’t help it. Romances, novels, all that trash!’
‘And you send what you write to London?’
Houlot nodded. But he seemed all at once to have repented of his freedom of speech, and took refuge in his usual taciturnity. Then once more hugging his stick, he started off at his usual shambling trot.
THE CAT—ANCIENT AND MODERN.
Cruel and treacherous, a lover of the night and darkness, the cat, with its distrustful gaze and marked attachment to localities, was very naturally the animal selected, in the middle ages of superstition and witchcraft, to represent the familiar companion, in which was embodied the evil spirit supposed to attend all those who practised the black art in former times. Long before this time, however, as some people are probably aware, the cat was one of the most highly favoured animals living; petted, pampered, carefully protected, and actually worshipped by the then most civilised people in the world, the ancient Egyptians. How this reverence came to be paid to the cat in particular by this extraordinary people it is quite impossible to determine; but by some it is supposed to have originated from the benefits conferred on mankind by its destruction of vermin and reptiles; at anyrate, if the Egyptian cats were as useful as they are represented to have been, the care taken of them is easily accounted for. Though it seems somewhat difficult to understand how the sportsmen of the Nile trained their cats not only to hunt game but to retrieve it from the water, the hunting scenes depicted on walls at Thebes and on a stone now in the British Museum, afford proof of the Egyptian cat’s services in this respect. In one of these representations Puss is depicted in the act of seizing a bird that has been brought down by the marksman in the boat; while in the other scene, as the sport has not begun, the cats are seen in the boat ready for their work. Thus it appears from these ancient illustrations of field and other sports, that the Egyptians were able to train their domestic cats to act in the same way as our modern retriever dogs do.
It is generally supposed that nothing will induce a cat to enter water; but this is clearly a fallacy, like many other popular notions about the animal world. The tiger is an excellent swimmer, as many have found to their cost; and so the cat, another member of the tiger family, can swim equally well if it has any occasion to exert its powers, either in quest of prey, or to effect its escape from some enemy. As cats are exceedingly fond of fish, they will often drag them alive out of their native element whenever they get the chance. They have even been known to help themselves out of aquaria that have been left uncovered; and on moonlight nights they may be seen watching for the unwary occupants of a fish-pond, during the spawning season especially. Again, a cat will take the water in the pursuit of a rat, a fact that was proved by a friend of ours a few years ago. On one occasion being accompanied by one of his pets, a rat was started, which the cat not only pursued, but chased into the water close by, eventually swimming to an island some little distance from the bank, where it remained a short time and then swam back again.
Diana or Pasht, as that goddess was called in Egypt, was the tutelary deity of cats. Various reasons are assigned for this curious selection of the cat as the animal worthy of being dedicated to the moon. We find that according to Plutarch, the cat was not only sacred to the moon, but an emblem of it; and that a figure of a cat was fixed on a sistrum to denote the moon, just as a figure of a frog on a ring denoted a man in embryo. And further, it was supposed that the pupils of a cat’s eyes always dilated as the moon got towards the full, and then decreased as the moon waned again. This has been given by some as the reason why cats were held sacred to the goddess Diana.