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 184 devotion which compels her to quietly and modestly withdraw.

All this, Chateaubriand understood, and accepted without protest, when he granted to the cat her freedom, and proclaimed himself the least exacting of her lovers. Even the mysterious nature of her past history allured rather than repelled him. He it is who tells us the fantastic story of Count Combourg's wooden leg, which, three hundred years after its owner's death, was wont to walk abroad on its own account, accompanied by a great black cat. When the moon waned, and sleepers woke trembling with the terrors of the night, they heard this leg hop slowly down the winding turret stairs, and they knew that, stealing before it in the darkness, crept the cat, with tail erect, and eyes of lambent flame. It would not have been a pleasant thing to meet that little phantom, guarding its impish prize.

The "Mémoires d'outre Tombe " contain some charming allusions to the many cats whom Chateaubriand loved and lost. Through all the vicissitudes of his changeful life, they were his solace, his diversion, his delight. The dreary days of his English exile were brightened and softened by the companionship of two beautiful pussies, "white as ermines, with black tips to their tails;"—pussies who possessed—or so at least the desolate