Poor Black Cat—Dissenters—Persecution—What Impudence!
The house or cottage, for it was called a cottage though it consisted of
two stories, in which my wife had procured lodgings for us, was situated
in the northern suburb. Its front was towards a large perllan or
orchard, which sloped down gently to the banks of the Dee; its back was
towards the road leading from Wrexham, behind which was a high bank, on
the top of which was a canal called in Welsh the Camlas, whose
commencement was up the valley about two miles west. A little way up the
road, towards Wrexham, was the vicarage, and a little way down was a
flannel factory, beyond which was a small inn, with pleasure grounds,
kept by an individual who had once been a gentleman’s servant. The
mistress of the house was a highly respectable widow, who with a servant
maid was to wait upon us. It was as agreeable a place in all respects as
people like ourselves could desire.
As I and my family sat at tea in our parlour, an hour or two after we had
taken possession of our lodgings, the door of the room and that of the
entrance to the house being open, on account of the fineness of the
weather, a poor black cat entered hastily, sat down on the carpet by the
table, looked up towards us, and mewed piteously. I never had seen so
wretched a looking creature. 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. O, 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. Well might
the cat after having led this kind of life for better than two years look
mere skin and bone when it made its appearance in our apartment, and have
an eruptive malady, and also a bronchitic cough, for I remember it had
both. How it came to make its appearance there is a mystery, for it had
never entered the house before, even when there were lodgers; that it
should not visit the woman, who was its declared enemy, was natural
enough, but why if it did not visit her other lodgers, did it visit us?
Did instinct keep it aloof from them? Did instinct draw it towards us?
We gave it some bread-and-butter, and a little tea with milk and sugar.
It ate and drank and soon began to purr. The good woman of the house was
horrified when on coming in to remove the things she saw the church cat
on her carpet. “What impudence!” she exclaimed, and made towards it, but
on our telling her that we did not expect that it should be disturbed,
she let it alone. A very remarkable circumstance was, that though the
cat had hitherto been in the habit of flying not only from her face, but
the very echo of her voice, it now looked her in the face with perfect
composure, as much as to say, “I don’t fear you, for I know that I am now
safe and with my own people.” It stayed with us two hours and then went
away. The next morning it returned. To be short, though it went away
every night, it became our own cat, and one of our family. I gave it
something which cured it of its eruption, and through good treatment it
soon lost its other ailments and began to look sleek and bonny.