Some Poets' Cats. 345 



" Cats there lay, divers had been flayed and roasted, 

 And after mouldy grown were toasted ; 

 Then, selling not, a dish was ta'en to mince them. 

 But still it seemed, the rankness did convince 'em. 

 For here they were thrown in with the melted pewter. 

 Yet drowned they not ; they had five lives in future." 



In every town there is a constant proportion of vagabond 

 cats that have no homes ; and what house is there that has 

 not at one time or another mysteriously lost its cat ? Now, 

 is there no connection between these two phenomena ? For 

 myself, I cannot help thinking that the "lost" cats are 

 merely animals that, " to serve some private ends," have 

 deliberately, gone elsewhere. The gipsy instinct has over- 

 taken them, and they have decamped in quest of adventure, 

 and on the chance of "bettering" themselves. Some of 

 them, perhaps, go away to die — for is it not a curious fact 

 that so few of these pets ever die at home? But the 

 majority simply disappear. The children are told pussy 

 has " run away," By-and-by another cat comes ; that is 

 to say, it installs itself. No one probably invited it, but, as 

 it was mewing very much, the hall door or the kitchen door 

 was opened, and it was allowed to come in, on approbation. 

 But the small stranger made itself at home at once, 

 rubbed against the cook's petticoats — cats have an extra- 

 ordinary instinct for cooks — and sat down in the very 

 middle of the hearth opposite the fire, and there it re- 

 mained. 



As there was no other cat in the house, it was taken on. 

 Now, it must have come from somewhere, as certainly as 

 its predecessor went somewhere ; so that perhaps there is a 

 perpetual exchanging of cats going on. Everybody gets 

 everybody else's in turn. 



This mysterious but periodical disappearance of the 

 household pets finds, however, an explanation in the popular 

 tradition that every cat has to spend one life out of its nine 



