owed hospital, the greater part of the funds of which was
devoted to the support and medical treatment of invalid cranes and
storks, and procuring them a decent sepulture whenever they chanced to
die. The founders are said to have entertained the poetical notion that
these birds are, in truth, human beings, natives of distant islands, who
at certain periods assume a foreign shape, and after they have satisfied
their curiosity with visiting other lands, return to their own, and
resume their original form.

To return, however, not to our sheep, but our cats, we must remark that,
in modern times, in spite of the kindness the cat habitually receives in
Egypt, his _morale_ is not in that country rated very high--the
universal impression being that, although, like Snug the joiner's lion,
he is by nature "a very gentle beast," still he is by no means "of a
good conscience;" that he is, in short, a most ungrateful beast; and
that when, in a future state, it is asked of him how he has been treated
by man in this, he will obstinately deny all the benefits he has
received at his hand, and give him such a character for cruelty and
hardness of heart as is shocking to think of. The dog, however, it is
understood, will conduct himself more discreetly, and readily
acknowledge the good offices for which he is indebted to the family of
mankind.

Singular anecdotes have been related of the intense repugnance persons
have been found to entertain to these, at worst, harmless animals. One
shall be given in the very words of the Rev. Nicholas Wanley, who, in
his authentic _Wonders of the Little World_, has recorded a number of
other facts quite as marvellous, and sustained by testimony not one whit
more exceptionable: "Mathiolus tells of a German, who coming in
wintertime into an inn to sup with him and some other of his friends,
the woman of the house being acquainted with his temper (lest he should
depart at the sight of a young cat which she kept to breed up), had
beforehand hid her kitling in a chest in the same room where we sat at
supper. But though he had neither seen nor heard it, yet after some time
that he had sucked in the air infected by the cat's breath, that quality
of his temperament that had antipathy to that creature being provoked,
he sweat, and, of a sudden, paleness came over his face, and to the
wonder of us all that were present, he cried out that in some corner of
the room there was a cat that lay hid." Not long after