came immediately a great
favorite with my wife.

For my own part, I soon found a dislike to it arising within me. This
was just the reverse of what I had anticipated; but--I know not how
or why it was--its evident fondness for myself rather disgusted and
annoyed. By slow degrees, these feelings of disgust and annoyance rose
into the bitterness of hatred. I avoided the creature; a certain sense
of shame, and the remembrance of my former deed of cruelty, preventing
me from physically abusing it. I did not, for some weeks, strike, or
otherwise violently ill use it; but gradually--very gradually--I came
to look upon it with unutterable loathing, and to flee silently from its
odious presence, as from the breath of a pestilence.

What added, no doubt, to my hatred of the beast, was the discovery, on
the morning after I brought it home, that, like Pluto, it also had been
deprived of one of its eyes. This circumstance, however, only endeared
it to my wife, who, as I have already said, possessed, in a high degree,
that humanity of feeling which had once been my distinguishing trait,
and the source of many of my simplest and purest pleasures.

With my aversion to this cat, however, its partiality for myself seemed
to increase. It followed my footsteps with a pertinacity which it would
be difficult to make the reader comprehend. Whenever I sat, it would
crouch beneath my chair, or spring upon my knees, covering me with its
loathsome caresses. If I arose to walk it would get between my feet and
thus nearly throw me down, or, fastening its long and sharp claws in my
dress, clamber, in this manner, to my breast. At such times, although
I longed to destroy it with a blow, I was yet withheld from so doing,
partly by a memory of my former crime, but chiefly--let me confess it at
once--by absolute dread of the beast.

This dread was not exactly a dread of physical evil--and yet I should be
at a loss how otherwise to define it. I am almost ashamed to own--yes,
even in this felon's cell, I am almost ashamed to own--that the terror
and horror with which the animal inspired me, had been heightened by one
of the merest chimaeras it would be possible to conceive. My wife had
called my attention, more than once, to the character of the mark of
white hair, of which I have spoken, and which constituted the sole
visible difference between the strange beast and the one I had
destroyed. The reader will remember that this mark, although large, had