And our ladder was made ready by two seamen strong and steady, And up came the whaler captain; on his shoulders stood a cat, With her eyes both brightly gleaming, with her tail outstretched, outstreaming. Surely, thought I, I am dreaming, to see visitor like that, See a captain come to see us in a way so strange as that! What on earth can he be at? Then the cabin did we enter, and before we could prevent her, Came the cat with tail uplifted, straightway down the cuddy stair; And the lamps were not yet lighted, and we sat down, half benighted, We three; and the uninvited――the intruder, she was there, On the shoulders of the captain, the intruder standing there, With green eyes and ebon hair. Still upon the captain’s shoulder, strange it seemed to the beholder, In the twilight of the cabin, among strangers standing so; And I fancied it would fright her when the cuddy lamps grew lighter. And I mused upon the writer of “The Raven,” Edgar Poe, On that weird and wondrous genius, wilful, wayward Edgar Poe, Dead now eighteen years ago! There she stood, with green eyes gleaming; there she stood, with tail outstreaming, A black line athwart the cuddy, rising somewhat high in air. And the captain look’d behind him, as though puss in spell did bind him, And, without a sound, inclined him to keep looking o’er his chair, To keep turning to the black cat, on his shoulder o’er the chair, With a look that held despair! (The Yankee skipper relates that he had formerly been a slave-dealer, and that having bought a negro with his child, he was entreated not to part them.) “Deaf was I to all compassion; brutally I laid the lash on His defenceless naked shoulders; yet I tortured him in vain And my anger growing bigger, out with pistol, pull’d the trigger; With a cry, dropp’d down the nigger, with a startling cry of pain, With the spasm of the death-pang shooting o’er his face of pain, Never more to move again!” “Sitting in my parlour lonely, thinking on my day’s work only, This black cat you see before you, sat herself upon the chair; And in vain I tried to please her, all in vain I sought to tease her, Oh, if I could but release her from her hold upon me there! On my chair, or on my shoulder, ever will that cat be there, With her eyes of constant glare!” “Smile you may, and disbelieve me; that black cat can ne’er deceive me; She is sent me from the darkie, come to haunt me for my crime, And will leave me never, never, and on earth will haunt me ever. Oh, that I the tie could sever! Oh, the dismal, dismal time! All the horrors of the past, and all the dreary present time, Far too sad for prose or rhyme!” * * * * *