Page:The fireside sphinx.djvu/114

 88 wild or tame,—acknowledging it possibly as a universal and most excellent characteristic of all sentient creatures. "When he hath a fayre skinne, he is, as it were, prowde thereof, and then he goeth faste aboute to be seene."

Other sins, more flagrant than vanity, were laid at Pussy's doors. Not only was she the "mortal Enemy" of rats and mice, which won her chill esteem from selfish utilitarians; but, like a true freebooter, she waged war with the same frank enjoyment upon "every sort of Bird," as Maister Salmon sadly confesses; making no nice distinction between the feathered nestling of the woods and her master's treasured possessions. Farmers' wives were wont to fasten little sprigs of rue beneath the wings of their chicks and ducklings, in the belief that the cat's distaste for this herb of grace would save the barnyard innocents. The marauding spirit that sent her pillaging the cupboard, and revelling in the dairy, prompted her patient and sinister ambush beneath the swinging wicker cage, wherein piped a tame bullfinch or spiritless captive lark. The Greek Agathias, passionately lamenting the death of his pet partridge in the cat's cruel claws, is outclamoured by John Skelton, who, for hundreds of lines in "The Boke of Phylyp Sparowe," bewails the fate of that insignificant bird, and hurls—in fair Margery's name—breathless and terrible denunciations at its destroyer.