This is to be a sober Sunday sermon, even though it largely concerns Calico Cats. What is a calico cat? you will ask. The first we ever heard of the strange beast, after the Eugene Field poem, was at a concert of the Philharmonic Society, when Mortimer Wilson conducted a clever orchestral suite in which figured the Funeral of the Calico Cat; that is, a specific cat, one, let it be said in passing, that was quite tiny at the beginning of the music, but grew to monstrous proportions before its interment; a cat that would have put to blush the “Cheshire Puss” of Alice’s in the fable. Cats in calico may be seen on the streets any Gotham summer day, but a calico cat--what in the world may that be? The simulacrum of a feline, an eidolon, such as Mr. Howell once described? We can’t ask Mr. Wilson, because he might refer us to his charming score, which speaks for itself. Verhaeren, the Belgian poet, the greatest living poet at the time of his death at Rouen, with the solitary exception of Gabriele d’Annunzio, Emile Verhaeren has written about “Cats of ebony, Cats of flame,” but, manifestly, a cat can’t be both flaming and calico. We must turn to that lover of cats, Charles Baudelaire, who wrote sonnets to his cats as others have penned praises of their mistresses’ eyebrows. He discovered to France the genius of Richard Wagner and the genius of Edouard Manet, not to mention Poe’s. Jules Claretie relates that Baudelaire said to him, with a grimace: “I love Wagner; but the music I prefer is that of a cat hung by his tail outside of a window, and trying to stick to the panes of glass with its claws. There is an odd grating on the glass which I find at the same time strange, irritating, and singularly harmonious.”