superstitious people of all
are often to be found among those who do not believe in God, and who
would not dream of entering a church-gate unless there was no other
way of avoiding walking under a ladder. These it is who pick up pins
with the greatest enthusiasm, and who become downcast if a dog howls,
and who had rather not sleep at all than sleep in a room numbered
thirteen. They will deride the cherubim and the seraphim, but they
will not risk offending the demon to whom they throw an oblation of
the salt they have just spilt on the table. It is as though each man
carried his own little firmament of immortals about with him, and
sacrificed to them on his own infinitesimal altars. This is not, I
suspect, because he loves them, but because he fears them. He regards
them as a species of blackmailers--the Scottish way of looking at
fairies. Nearly every portent is to him a portent of misfortune. The
number thirteen, the spilling of salt, the bay of a dog, the sight of
a red-haired man first thing on New Year's morning, dreams about
babies--these things cast a gloom over his world deeper than midnight;
and of this kind are nearly all the portents which wriggle like little
snakes in the superstitious imagination.

It is the distinction of the black cat that he is one of the few
cheerful superstitions left to us. Why he should be so no one can tell
us, and he has not been considered so in all times or in all places.
He has even been regarded on occasion as the false shape of a witch.
Perhaps, the origin of all our care of him was the tenderness of fear.
He may be like the black god worshipped by the ancient Slavs who were
indifferent to his white brother-god. They did this, we are told,
because they thought that the white god was so good that they had
nothing to fear from him in any case. But the black god one could not
trust, and so one had to buy his goodwill. It seems not improbable
that the veneration of the black cat may have begun in much the same
way. The smile with which our ancestors first greeted him was, I
fancy, a nervous, doubting smile, like the smile with which many of us
try to cajole snarling dogs. Then, gradually, as he did not leap upon
them and destroy them, they came to believe less and less in his will
to do evil, and in the end he was canonised, and now he has been
accepted as a sound English Tory, which is generally admitted to be
the highest type of animal that Nature has produced.

Two centuries