THE CAT.

King Country Chronicle, Volume VI, Issue 475, 19 June 1912, Page 7

THE CAT.

XT MUST NOT BE TREATED WITH ANY WANT OF RESPECT. The domestic cat 1 is above all things an anarchist. It submits to no rule ; it acknowledges no obligations. The dog may lick the hand that beats it, but the cat says—"You have brought me into your scheme of civilisation ; I did not ask to come, and I do not ask to stay." Somepeople are so misguided as to think that the cat is less intelligent than the dog. The could tell you where lies" the lack of intelligence. She knows what we want her to do, but, having heard all that we have to say, she declines to do it. This is good for us all. It prevents us from becoming too arrogant, or from thinking that our voice is the voice of a god because the dog supposes it to be so. Proudhon rightly placed a cat at the feet of his figure of ■ Liberty. The cat is scarcely within the\ pale of respectability. She is not mentioned in the Bible. She defies even the laws of language —Grimm's and all others. No one knows from svhat the name is derived.

A distinguished scholar at Cambridge used to pretend that men admired cats or dogs according as they vere Platonists 0 r Aristotelians. The risionary chooses a cat ; the ,man of concrete plans a dog. Hamlet must have kept a tat. Platonists, or catovers, the scholar used to cay, include sailors, painters, poets, and pickpockets. Aristotelians, or dogovers, include, soldiers, footballDlayers, and burglars. The li'iing. of sailors for cats is at all events eszablished. There is a story that af;er the battle of Trafalgar, when English sailors were bringing the Frenchmen and Spaniards away from their burning ships,. one boat's crew aad just pushed off from the side of a ship when a piteous mew was heard from a cat which had been left on board. The boat returned to the ship's side, and an English sailor tried again and again to rescue the cat through the port-hole at which its head had been thrust. Wh:n ho tried to seize her the cat retreated, and all this time the whole boat's company was in danger of being sacrificed to the cat by the sinkin;( or blowing-up of the ship. The cat was rescued just before the ship dis' appeared, and no doubt every sailor (and Platonist) superstitiously believed that he had averted nooic calamity from himself by the kindly deed.

Men of the highest discrimination have felt the apalling impropriety o! treating cats with any want of respect. Mohammed cut off his sleeve rather than wake his sleeping cat, and Montaigne was depressed because he felt that his cat regarded him with a disparaging air. Heine, on the other hand, as a man of levity, '.ompared his most heartless lover with cats. Matthew Arnold was near the right feeling,, but not quite is possession of it : 'Cruel, but composed and bland, Dumb, inscrutable, and grand. 3o Tiberius might have sat Had Tiberius been a cat." Probably it was impossible for th€ owner of "Geist" to say more.— "Spectator."