India -- Social life and customs -- Fiction; Short stories, English
When a man who hates cats wakes up in the morning and finds a little
squirming kitten on his breast, or puts his hands 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 downward, in his tobacco-jar, or being mangled by his
terrier in the veranda,--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 favored 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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