256 THE DOMESTIC CAT. 



are young and tender. In St. Catherine's Docks, London, cats 

 are expressly kept to destroy the rats, which, previous to this 

 mode of exterminating them, used to make vast havoc amongst 

 the sugar stores deposited there. That the cats do not eat 

 many of the rats is proved from the circumstance of the annual 

 expense of cat's-meat, bought by contract, amounting to one 

 hundred and four pounds sterling. They are fed by two men, 

 at six o'clock in the morning and at nine in the evening. 

 " Our ancestors," Pennant remarks, " had a high sense of the 

 utility of this animal. That excellent Prince, Hoel dda, or 

 Howel the Good, who died in the year 948, has included the 

 cat among his laws relating to the prices, &c. of animals,* and 

 described the qualities she ought to have. The price of a kitten 

 before it could see, was to be a penny ; till it caught a mouse 

 two pence ; when it commenced mousing four pence. It was 

 required besides, that it should be perfect in its senses of 

 hearing and seeing ; be a good mouser -, have the claws whole, 

 and be a good nurse : but if it failed in any of these qualities, 

 the seller was to forfeit to the buyer the third part of its value. 

 If any one stole or killed the cat that guarded the Prince's 

 granary, he was to forfeit a milch ewe, its fleece, and lamb j 

 or as much wheat as when poured on the cat suspended by 

 the tail (the head touching the ground) would form a heap 

 high enough to cover the tip of the former. The large prices 

 set on them (if we consider the high value of specie at that 

 time), and the great care taken of the improvement and breed 

 of an animal so prolific, are almost certain proofs of their 

 being little known at that period, and nearly demonstrates 

 that cats are not aborigines of these islands, or known to the 

 earliest inhabitants." f 



When cats are too much pampered they will not eat the 

 mice they kill, and some indeed will not take the trouble to 

 catch them at all. A cat at Dorking, in Surrey, never ate the 

 mice he caught, but used to lay them at the feet of the first 

 person he met. 

 * Leges Wallica, p. 247, 248. f British Zoology (1768), vol. i. p. 46. 



