names signifying rat-eater and mouse-enemy, to denote the useful character of her occupations. She figures also in some of the oldest Indian fables, always as an arrant hypocrite, fair-spoken and full of guile. Her first entrance into the Chinese Empire appears to have been about 400 A. D., and she is described in ancient documents as a hunter of mice and slayer of hens, unmistakable characteristics, both of them. There is also a venerable proverb which says, with true Chinese sententiousness, that a lame cat is better than a swift horse when rats infest the palace. The rampant creature that rears itself aggressively on the royal banners of Korea is some fierce wild cousin of the cat; just as the animal held sacred for centuries along the Pacific coast of South America, and which we see over and over again in the terra cottas of lost Peruvian cities, was forest born and bred,—ocelot perhaps, or jaguar,—not the sweet domestic deity of the Nile.
The saddest gap in the chronicles of the cat is her conspicuous absence from "the glory that was Greece," from "the grandeur that was Rome,"—an absence which extended over many hundreds of years. No Greek monument shows her sitting at her master's feet, as the Egyptian Bouhaki sat for centuries at the feet of King Hana, in the Necropolis of Thebes. Homer, who tells us the touching story of the hound, Argus, has never a word for
