64 THE FIRESIDE SPHINX 



full upon his dead mistress. No persuasion nor 

 artifice could move him from his post. For two 

 whole days and nights he crouched there like a 

 panther tense for the spring. On the third morn- 

 ing, a man, suspected of the murder, was brought 

 into the room, when suddenly, and with horrible 

 fury, the creature hurled himself upon the assassin, 

 biting and tearing him savagely. Confession and 

 execution followed ; but of the cat's fate we know no- 

 thing. Two hundred years earlier, his shrift would 

 have been a short one. Not even his avenging 

 rage could have saved him from sharing the mur- 

 derer's grave. 



Innocence was no protection for an outcast of 

 his fated race. Among the famous French trials 

 of the seventeenth century is one of a woman who 

 had strangled in cold blood several little children 

 left by their mothers to her care. For this hideous 

 crime she was condemned to be hung in an iron 

 cage over a slow fire, in company with fourteen cats 

 that had killed nobody, but that added to the horror 

 of the spectacle by clawing fiercely at the murderess 

 in the throes of their own death agony. 



The page of Pussy's martyrdom has been long in 

 turning. It has been no pleasure, Heaven knows, to 

 linger over it ; but when we think of the strange and 

 bitter vicissitudes through which she has passed, 

 — this creature so small and helpless, so timid 



