odger
to reach the refuge of the cellar.

The cats of legend are not as many as one would suppose, or perhaps the
fault is still mine. Even here they evade me. I can call but few to
mind, Puss in Boots, Sir Tybalt in the animal epic of _Reynard the
Fox_, the Kilkenny cats of tragic fame, the grinning Cheshire cat--for
whose like I vainly looked in Cheshire--the mysterious Knurremurre of
Norway, and the far-fabled "King of the Cats." English chronicles, none
too authentic, tell of a busy mouser that made Dick Whittington mayor
of London, and of a faithful puss who ventured down a chimney of The
Tower to cheer her imprisoned master, the Earl of Southampton, by a
call. More worthy of credit is John Locke's account, preserved by
Hakluyt, of an honorable incident in his voyage to Jerusalem,
undertaken in the spring of 1553. The pilgrim ship was about fifty
miles from Jaffa, when it "chanced by fortune that the Shippes Cat lept
into the Sea, which being downe, kept her selfe very valiauntly above
water, notwithstanding the great waves, still swimming, the which the
master knowing, he caused the Skiffe with halfe a dosen men to goe
towards her and fetch her againe, when she was almost halfe a mile from
the shippe, and all this while the ship lay on staies. I hardly beleeve
they would have made such haste and meanes if one of the company had
been in the like perill. They made the more haste because it was the
patrons cat. This I have written onely to note the estimation that cats
are in, among the Italians, for generally they esteeme their cattes, as
in England we esteeme a good Spaniell."

Petrarch and Tasso are eminent witnesses to the Italian fondness for
cats. The French, too, have long been famed as cat lovers; Montaigne,
Chateaubriand, Gautier, Pierre Loti, Jules Lemaitre, Baudelaire, La
Fontaine, Champfleury, Michelet have all written charmingly of the
Fireside Sphinx, leaving it to a Belgian poet, Maeterlinck, to present
poor pussy as a stage villain. English literature takes less account of
her, though Chaucer keenly expresses the friar's choice of a
comfortable seat by telling how

"fro the bench he droof awey the cat,"

and Skelton has poured invective on the slayer of Philip Sparow,
calling down vengeance

"On all the hole nacyon
Of cattes wilde and tame;
God send them sorowe and shame!"

No reader of Tudor drama needs to be reminded of Gammer Gurton's Gyb,
crouching in the fireplace, where