ogs and cats, who,
conceiving that the late vicar's cat had no business at the vicarage,
drove it forth to seek another home, which, however, it could not find.
Almost all the people of the suburb were dissenters, as indeed were the
generality of the people of Llangollen, and knowing the cat to be a
church cat, not only would not harbour it, but did all they could to make
it miserable; whilst the few who were not dissenters, would not receive
it into their houses, either because they had cats of their own, or dogs,
or did not want a cat, so that the cat had no home and was dreadfully
persecuted by nine-tenths of the suburb. Oh, there never was a cat so
persecuted as that poor Church of England animal, and solely on account
of the opinions which it was supposed to have imbibed in the house of its
late master, for I never could learn that the dissenters of the suburb,
nor indeed of Llangollen in general, were in the habit of persecuting
other cats; the cat was a Church of England cat, and that was enough:
stone it, hang it, drown it! were the cries of almost everybody. If the
workmen of the flannel factory, all of whom were Calvinistic-Methodists,
chanced to get a glimpse of it in the road from the windows of the
building, they would sally forth in a body, and with sticks, stones, or
for want of other weapons, with clots of horse dung, of which there was
always plenty on the road, would chase it up the high bank or perhaps
over the Camlas; the inhabitants of a small street between our house and
the factory leading from the road to the river, all of whom were
dissenters, if they saw it moving about the perllan, into which their
back windows looked, would shriek and hoot at it, and fling anything of
no value, which came easily to hand, at the head or body of the
ecclesiastical cat. The good woman of the house, who though a very
excellent person, was a bitter dissenter, whenever she saw it upon her
ground or heard it was there, would make after it, frequently attended by
her maid Margaret, and her young son, a boy about nine years of age, both
of whom hated the cat, and were always ready to attack it, either alone
or in company, and no wonder, the maid being not only a dissenter, but a
class teacher, and the boy not only a dissenter, but intended for the
dissenting ministry. Where it got its food, and food it sometimes must
have got, for even a cat, an animal known to have nine lives, cannot live
without food, was only kno