her eyes, mistaken for sparks of
fire, refused to be blown out. Shakespeare's frequent references to the
"harmless, necessary cat" are as accurate as they are nonchalant, but
Milton does not mention her in his account of the creation, although
she would certainly have been more comforting to Eve, at least, than
"Behemoth, biggest born of earth," or "the parsimonious emmet." Indeed,
an Arabic story of the creation claims that the dog and cat were
allowed to accompany Adam and Eve, for their protection and solace,
into the waste beyond the flaming sword. Herrick's "green-eyed
kitling;" Walpole's Selima of

"The fair round face, the snowy beard,
The velvet of her paws,
Her coat that with the tortoise vies,
Her ears of jet and emerald eyes,"

--charms all forfeit to her longing for stolen goldfish; Arnold's
Atossa

--"So Tiberius might have sat,
Had Tiberius been a cat,"--

have made their way into poetry, but prose, especially the familiar
prose of letters, has kept green the memory of many a pussy more. We
love Dr. Johnson the better for his consideration of Hodge "for whom,"
reports Boswell, "he himself used to go out and buy oysters, lest the
servants, having that trouble, should take a dislike to the poor
creature." Of course the tender-hearted Cowper cared for cats, and even
the industrious Southey would turn his epic-blunted quill to accounts
of Rumpelstilzchen and Hurlyburlybuss,--sonorous cat-names closely
pressed upon by Mark Twain's Sour Mash, Apollinaris, Zoroaster and
Blatherskite, while Canon Liddon's Tweedledum and Tweedledee of Amen
Corner are not far behind.

No portrait of a cat in English verse is more vivid than that given in
the sestette of Mrs. Marriott Watson's oft-praised sonnet:

"Sphinx of my quiet hearth! who deign'st to dwell
Friend of my toil, companion of mine ease,
Thine is the lore of Ra and Rameses;
That men forget dost thou remember well,
Beholden still in blinking reveries,
With somber, sea-green gaze inscrutable."

It is pleasant to think that the race memory of puss goes farther back
in time and farther east in geography than the witchcraft cruelties of
Christendom. The Mohammedan faith has been kinder to her than ours.
Persia has ever held her in affection. Mahomet cut off the flowing edge
of his sleeve rather than disturb Muezza's nap. But most of all her
inherent aristocracy springs from those shining centuries by the Nil