The city of Cheyenne, Wyoming, recently experienced a peculiar and
singularly sharp affliction in the insanity of all its cats. Cheyenne
cats had theretofore been regarded as the most level-headed and least
mercurial of their species. Nothing in their aspect nor demeanor
had been observed to justify a suspicion that they suffered from
uncommonness of mind; then they developed symptoms of such pronounced
intellectual independence that even the local physicians, inured
to all phases and degrees of eccentricity in the human contingent
of Cheyenne’s population, were unable to ignore the melancholy
significance of the phenomena—the cats of Cheyenne were indubitably as
mad as hatters.
To him who has duly considered the cat’s place in the scheme of modern
civilization, the actual calamity will suggest possibilities of the
most dismal and gruesome sort. In imagination he will see (and hear)
the mental epidemic spreading by contagion until it affects the cats
of the whole world, and perhaps those of Denver. The musical outlook
is discouraging: the orchestration of a feline lunatic in one of its
deuced intervals can be nothing less than appalling! Fancy a maniacal
male of the species, beneath his favorite window of the dormitory
of a hospital for nervous insomnia, securely casemented in an empty
crate and courting rather than avoiding the assaults of the wild
bootjacquerie above, while twanging his disordered fiddle-strings for
the production of
a long unmeasured tone
To mortal minstrelsy unknown,
and then executing such variants of his theme as no rational cat has
ever been able or willing to compose!
The cause of the outbreak was no less remarkable than the outbreak
itself: the cats of Cheyenne incurred mental confusion from being
supercharged with electricity. For a period of seven weeks the wind
blew across the delightful region of which that city is the capital, at
a calculated average velocity of thirty miles an hour. “The ground in
consequence,” according to a resident scientist, “has become extremely
dry, and the friction of the wind in passing over it has produced
an enormous quantity of electricity, and every one is more or less
charged.” So seriously indeed were some of the newer residents affected
that they have had to leave Cheyenne and go to California for relief;
and of those remaining it is related that even now when they shake
hands there is a distinct and painful shock to him who is the less
electrified. The performance of this social rite has therefore fallen
into “innocuous desuetude,” men conscious of being imperfectly charged
eying every approaching friend with natural suspicion, and preferring
to pain him with a distant bow rather than incur the thunderbolt of
a more familiar greeting. It is not apprehended that our most sacred
American custom is menaced with anything more than local and temporary
suspension, but it is feared that the American cat is on the eve of
stupendous intellectual and musical changes that will make the name of
Cheyenne memorable forever.