ss of those tiger claws hid in
the velvet daintiness of the light feet, neither can tabby put her
trust in us. Race memory and, too often, individual experience accuse
us. Her reticence with humankind, her stealth, her self-reliance, might
well have been stamped deep into cat character by the monstrous
cruelties she has suffered at our hands. Her reputed connection with
witches, of whom it is estimated that Christendom put to death some
nine million, involved the poor animal in their hideous tortures.
Indeed, she caught it from all sides. Cats were flung into the bonfires
to perish with the helpless old crones who had cared for them. A witch
might be exorcised by whipping a cat, like the wretched puss long and
solemnly flogged by twelve priests "in a parlor at Denham, til shee
vanished out of theyr sight." And it was a cat, so confession on the
rack declared, that after an accursed christening was cast into the sea
to raise a storm that should drown James of Scotland, "the devil's
worst enemy," on his wedding journey home from Denmark. This royal
witch-hunter, who came thirteen years later to the throne of England,
was not content until thirty human victims had paid by horrible deaths
for the black art of that storm.

A few of these maligned cats have left a distinctive record on the
blurred page of history. Rutterkin, the familiar of Agnes Flower, whose
very name should have attested her innocence, was black as the soot of
hell, but Mother Fraunces, who learned the secrets of sorcery from her
own grandmother, had "a whyte spotted cat * * * to be her sathan,"
while the leader of the infernal chorus in the cavern scene of
_Macbeth_ was a tabby:

"Thrice the brinded cat hath mewed."

Into other inoffensive little beasts, "hedgepigs," puppies, owls, bats,
crows, rabbits, toads, the evil spirits were believed to enter, though
Thomas Heywood notes with satisfaction that no imp was ever so
sacrilegious as to masquerade as dove or lamb; but the cat calumny has
lasted longest.

"And shall I be afrayd
Of Cats in mine own Countrey?"

Some of us are, for a recent criminal trial in one of the Middle States
brought out the fact that many an American pocket, even to-day, carries
a silver bullet as a talisman against the "black hex," or witch-cat.

Yet from the cruelties of superstition poor puss has suffered less than
from the cruelties of sport. Rustic festivals in Merry England were not
complete