of warlocks and of witches, stole through the lattice window as a sleek black cat. Perchance some passing traveller, seeing her glide by, wounded her with stone or sword; and the next morning she was found maimed and bleeding beneath the counterpane. In ruined churches, pillaged and desecrated by the unsparing wickedness of war, there assembled, on the eve of Saint John, hags and wizards and young girls caught in Satan's toils, all creeping through the darkness under the forms of cats, and all afire with impious relish for sorcery and sin.
Innumerable legends cluster around the cat during these picturesque centuries of superstition, when men were poor in letters, but rich in vivid imaginings; when they were densely ignorant, but never dull. Even after the Dark Ages had grown light, there was no lifting of the gloom which enveloped Pussy's pathway, there was no visible softening of her lot. The stories told of her impish wickedness have the same general character throughout Europe. We meet them with modest variations in France, in Germany, in Sweden, Denmark, England, Scotland and Wales. It was a belated woodcutter of Brittany who saw with horror-stricken eyes thirteen cats dancing in sacrilegious glee around a wayside crucifix. One he killed with his axe, and the other twelve disappeared in a trice. It was a charcoal-burner in the Black For-
