It
Was Dreadfully Attenuated, Being Little More Than Skin And Bone,
And Was Sorely Afflicted With An Eruptive Malady.
And here I may
as well relate the history of this cat previous to our arrival
which I subsequently learned by bits and snatches.
It had belonged
to a previous vicar of Llangollen, and had been left behind at his
departure. His successor brought with him dogs 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 known to itself, as
was the place where it lay, for even a cat must lie down sometimes;
though a labouring man who occasionally dug in the garden told me
he believed that in the springtime it ate freshets, and the woman
of the house once said that she believed it sometimes slept in the
hedge, which hedge, by-the-bye, divided our perllan from the
vicarage grounds, which were very extensive.
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