Cats, too, were valued pets in former days, and probably found such easy domesticity more to their tastes than the burdensome honors of Egypt. In fact, when the Egyptian cat was not living in sanctified seclusion as the friend and favorite of Pasht, she was apparently earning a laborious livelihood as a retriever, if we may trust a relic of Egyptian art in the British Museum, which shows us a magnificent animal carrying no less than three struggling wild fowls in her mouth and claws. But when Puss at last entered Greece and Rome, about the time of the Christian era, or perhaps a century or two earlier, it was simply as a plaything; and Mr. Pater in “Marius the Epicurean” describes very charmingly the snow-white beast brought by one of the guests to a Roman banquet, and purring its way among the wine-cups in response to caresses and coaxing words. Mrs. Graham R. Tomson, that most winning chronicler of the cat’s vicissitudes and triumphs, has also told us in graceful verse the history of a Greek lover who loses his mistress because he dares not bring her from Egypt one of these coveted and mysterious creatures: “A little lion, small and dainty sweet, (For such there be!) With sea-grey eyes and softly stepping feet, She prayed of me. For this, through lands Egyptian far away She bade me pass; But, in an evil hour, I said her nay— And now, alas! Far-traveled Nicias hath wooed and won Arsinoë With gifts of furry creatures white and dun From over-sea.” In the Museum of Antiquities, at Bordeaux, there is a mutilated tomb of the Gallo-Roman period showing still the indistinct outlines of a young girl and her two pets; a cat clasped—very uncomfortably—in her arms, and, at her feet, a dignified cock, which appears to be pecking viciously at poor pussy’s drooping tail. The few allusions we find to the cat in later Greek poetry are hardly of a flattering nature. Theocritus makes the impatient Praxinoë, in his XVth Idyl, say to her handmaid, “Eunoë, bring the water and put it down in the middle of the room, lazy creature that you are! Cats like always to sleep soft,”—quite as if it were disgraceful in them to enjoy their ease. The same passage is interpreted somewhat differently, and in a still more uncharitable spirit by Mr. Matthew Arnold: “Eunoë, pick up your work, and take care, lazy girl, how you leave it lying about again! The cats find it just the bed they like.” At least we know, by this token, that Puss was an inmate—understood if not honored—of the Alexandrian household. There is also a dog; for Praxinoë, on going out, bids Phrygia, the nurse, “Take the child, and keep him amused; call in the dog, and shut the street door.”