peared delighted with my notice. This, then, was the very
creature of which I was in search. I at once offered to purchase it of
the landlord; but this person made no claim to it--knew nothing of
it--had never seen it before.

I continued my caresses, and when I prepared to go home the animal
evinced a disposition to accompany me. I permitted it to do so,
occasionally stooping and patting it as I proceeded. When it reached the
house it domesticated itself at once, and became immediately a great
favourite 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 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