Whittington and His Cat. 



117 



At Mercers' Hall, to which company Whittington belonged, there 

 ia a portrait on canvas of a man of about sixty years of age, dressed 

 in a fine livery gown and black cap of the time of Henry VIII. It is 

 about a half length portrait, and on the left hand of the figure is a 

 black and white cat, whose right ear reaches up to the band, or broad 

 turning down of the skirt of the figure, and in the left-hand upper 

 corner of the canvas is painted " E. Whittington, 1536." The inn- 

 keepers of England, who, I think, can bear off the palm for curious 

 signs, early adopted this one, and the Lord Mayor and his feline friend 

 in many places invited the weary traveler to the ease that an inn af- 

 fords ; while one ambitious innkeeper outstripped all others in this 

 particular line, by exhibiting, in the window of his public house on the 

 Highgate Eoad, the skeleton of a cat, which the good people who visit 

 the place firmly believe to be the mortal remains of Whittington's 

 early friend. Now, all this is more curious, when we know that the 

 story of a cat being the source of a man's wealth, is not an English 

 story at all; but that long before Whittington was born, such stories 

 were current in Tuscany, Persia, Denmark and other countries. It is 

 possible, of course, that the heroes of all these stories had cats, and 

 got wealth by them, as Whittington is said to have done, but it is not 

 likely ; and when we come to read these stories, we find such a strik- 

 ing resemblance between them and that of our hero, that we are forced 

 to believe that they must have been transmitted from one country to 

 another in some way. You can only judge of the similarity of these 

 stories by permitting me to relate some of them ; and the first one we 

 shall take comes from Persia. 



In the 700th year of the Hejira (A. D., 1300), in the town of 

 Siraf, lived an old woman with her three sons, who, turning out 

 profligates, spent their own patrimony and their mother's fortune; 

 and abandoning her, went to live at Kais. A little while after, a 

 Siraf merchant undertook a trading voyage to India, and freighted 

 a ship. It was the custom of these days, that when a man undertook 

 a voyage to a distant land, each of his friends intrusted to his care 

 some article of property, and received its produce on his return. 

 The old woman, who was a friend of the merchant, complained that 

 her sons had left her so destitute that except a cat, she had nothing to 

 send as an adventure, which yet she requested him to take. On ar- 

 riving in India he waited upon the king of the country, who, having 

 granted him permission to trade with his subjects, also invited him to 

 dine. The merchant was surprised to see the beards of the King and 

 his courtiers encased m golden tubes; and the more so, w^hen he ob- 



