Page:Under the Sun.djvu/243

Rh bars, and stands there whimpering — “for the touch of a vanished cat and the sound of a puss that is still.”

There is one more charge against the cat, that, though well cared for and well fed, she affects a homeless condition and, going out on the pantiles, fore-gathers with other vagabonds of her kind, and in their company indulges in the music of the future, expressive of many mixed emotions, but irregular and depressing.

Cats seem saddest when they trespass. At home they are silent, but entering a neighbor’s premises they at once commence to confide their sorrows to the whole parish in melancholy dialogue, which in the morning are found to have been accompanied by violent saltations upon the flower-beds. Altogether, therefore, the cat out at night is one who deserves to be caught, and Mr. James Cartwright certainly had my sympathies in the object of his search. But for the means he employed to catch the cat it is impossible to entertain more than a very indifferent degree of respect. In the first place, he might have looked for his cat before one in the morning, which is an unconscionable hour to go running over the roofs of neighbors’ outhouses. Nor in his search need he have wrenched off the iron bar which closed the rag-dealer’s door, for it is not in evidence that his cat was of any extraordinary ferocity or proportions requiring so formidable a weapon of capture; nor, again, need he have looked in the till for his cat. Landladies’ cats, it is notorious, go into remarkable places, and sometimes demean themselves in a manner quite surprising in such small animals; for they will play on the lodger’s piano with dirty fingers, try on the lodger’s bonnets, and eat prodigious quantities of the lodger’s