An old writer says, "A favorite cat sometimes accompanied the Egyptians
on these occasions [of sport], and the artist of that day intends to
show us by the exactness with which he represents her seizing her prey,
that cats were trained to hunt and carry water-fowl." There are old
Egyptian paintings representing sporting scenes along the Nile, where
the cats plunge into the water of the marshes to retrieve and carry
game; while plenty of mural paintings show them sitting under the
arm-chair of the mistress of the house. Modern naturalists, however,
claim a radical difference between those old Egyptian retrieving cats
and our water-hating pussies. There are no records of cats between that
period in Egypt, about 1630 B.C., and 260 B.C., when they seem to have
become acclimated in Greece and Rome. There is in the Bordeaux Museum an
ancient picture of a young girl holding a cat, on a tomb of the
Gallo-Roman Epoch, and cats appeared in the heraldry of that date; but
writers of those ages speak rather slightingly of them. Then for
centuries the cat was looked upon as a diabolic creature, fit company
for witches.
"Why," says Balthazar Bekker in the seventeenth century, "is a cat
always found among the belongings of witches, when according to the
Sacred Book, and Apocalypse in particular, it is the dog, not a feline
animal, that consorts with the sorcerers?"
In Russia even yet the common people believe that black cats become
devils at the end of seven years, and in many parts of Southern Europe
they are still supposed to be serving apprenticeship as witches.
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