Page:The fireside sphinx.djvu/92

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66
THE FIRESIDE SPHINX

trembling through the village streets, the children pelted it with stones and clots of mud. "There never was a cat so ill-treated as that poor Church of England animal," says Borrow indignantly; "and altogether on account of the opinions which it was supposed to have imbibed in the house of its late master; for I never could learn that the dissenters of Llangollen were in the habit of persecuting other cats. The cat was a Church of England cat, and that was enough." Finally he was obliged to carry away this unconscious and reluctant martyr, and to seek for it an asylum in another village, where it was charitably received by a young woman, who, being herself an Anglican, was all the more ready to aid an oppressed scion of the Establishment.

It is a touch of comedy with which to ring down the curtain on Pussy's tragic past.