TJie Heptarchy of the Cats. 5 1 



two. It has a taste for mutton, but would prefer the lambs 

 coming into its private retreats to having to go and fetch 

 them out of the public meadow. Now, when we speak of 

 the ravages that wild animals commit, we forget that they 

 are usually of our own prompting or creating. We set to 

 work and cultivate a district, and populate it, driving out 

 or exterminating the natural food of the beasts, and then 

 fill large spaces with our own helpless " domestic " animals. 

 After this, if the wild beasts eat these we exclaim against 

 them, quite overlooking the fact that in most cases we have 

 made such consumption a necessity of ferine existence, and 

 in all have put temptation in the wild beasts' way in a most 

 immoral manner. 



And lynxes do not hesitate to avail themselves of their 

 opportunities, and this with such wastefulness that they will 

 kill far more sheep than they eat. But then beasts do not 

 know any better. When they get amongst lambs they are 

 like children among daisies, who murder the poor innocent 

 flowers by thousands, leave them lying in heaps close by 

 where they picked them, and go dripping daisies along the 

 road all the way home. 



For some reason or another these animals have acquired 

 the reputation of an extraordinarily piercing eyesight, and 

 from thee arliest times have been credited with the power of 

 seeing through opaque bodies. This fiction would appear 

 to constitute its chief claim to poetical regard. " Watchful," 

 Crabbe, Byron, Drayton, and others call it. 



" Thus parents also are at times short-sighted, 

 Though watchful as the lynx." 



Nor is the epithet misapplied, for, like every other species 

 of cat, it is very watchful, and indeed in the patience of 

 its ambuscades exhibits a somewhat special vigilance. So 

 •' calculation " is, poetically, Ijoix-eyed. It is the antithesis 

 of the mole and bat. The prophet borrows its vision — 



