When a man who hates cats wakes up in the morning and finds a little
squirming kitten on his breast, or puts his hand into his ulster-pocket
and finds a little half-dead kitten where his gloves should be, or opens
his trunk and finds a vile kitten among his dress-shirts, or goes for a
long ride with his mackintosh strapped on his saddle-bow and shakes a
little squawling kitten from its folds when he opens it, or goes out to
dinner and finds a little blind kitten under his chair, or stays at home
and finds a writhing kitten under the quilt, or wriggling among his
boots, or hanging, head downwards, in his tobacco-jar, or being mangled
by his terrier in the verandah,—when such a man finds one kitten,
neither more nor less, once a day in a place where no kitten rightly
could or should be, he is naturally upset. When he dare not murder his
daily trove because he believes it to be a Manifestation, an Emissary,
an Embodiment, and half a dozen other things all out of the regular
course of nature, he is more than upset. He is actually distressed. Some
of Lone Sahib’s co-religionists thought that he was a highly favoured
individual; but many said that if he had treated the first kitten with
proper respect—as suited a Toth-Ra-Tum-Sennacherib Embodiment—all this
trouble would have been averted. They compared him to the Ancient
Mariner, but none the less they were proud of him and proud of the
Englishman who had sent the Manifestation. They did not call it a
Sending because Icelandic magic was not in their programme.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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