Agag, though of undoubtedly royal blood, was never a real king. He was no more than one of the Hyksos, a shepherd-king, bound by the limitations of his race, and no partaker in its magnificence. Naturally, he did not work as the late housekeeper had done (and no one expected that of him), but he had neither the splendour nor the vivacity, possessed, let us say, by Henry VIII. or George IV., to make up for his indolence in affairs of state. Henry VIII., anyhow, busied himself in marriages, whereas Agag was merely terrified at the idea of wooing, not to say winning, any of the princesses that were brought to his notice; and they, on their part, only made the rudest faces at him. Again George IV., though unkingly in many respects, used to plunge about in the wild pursuit of pleasure, and was supposed to have a kind heart. Agag, on the contrary, never plunged: a cushion and some fish and plenty of repose were the sum of his desires, and as for a kind heart, he never had a heart at all. An unkind heart would have given him some semblance of personality, but there was not the faintest room to suppose that any emotion, other than the desire for food and sleep and warmth, came within measurable distance of him. He died in his sleep, probably of apoplexy, after a large meal, and beautiful in death as in life, was buried and forgotten. I have never known a cat so completely devoid of character, and I sometimes wonder whether he was a real cat at all, and not some sort of inflated dormouse in cat’s clothing. There followed a republican régime in this matter of cats. We went back, after Agag, to working cats, who would sit at mouse-holes for hours together, pounce and devour, and clean themselves and sleep, but among them all there was no “character” which ever so faintly resembled even Martha, far less Puss-cat. I suppose the royalty of Agag, stupid and dull though he was, had infected me with a certain snobbishness as regards cats, and secretly--given that there were to be no more of those splendid plebeians, like Puss-cat--I longed for somebody who combined royal descent (for the sake of beauty and pride) with character, good or bad. Nero or Heliogabalus or Queen Elizabeth, or even the Emperor William II. of Germany would have done, but I didn’t want George I. on the one side or a mere mild President of a small republic on the other. Just after Agag’s death I had moved up to London, and for a time there was this succession of unnoticeable heads of the state. They were born--those presidents of my republic--from respectable hard-working families, and never gave themselves out (though they knew quite well that they were the heads of the state) to be anything else but what they were: good, hard-working cats, with, of course, not only a casting, but a determining vote on all questions that concerned them or anybody else.