Maltese cat

“ The sun shone into my bath-water through the west half-window, and a big Maltese cat came up and rubbed himself against the tub, watching me curiously. While I scrubbed, my grandmother busied herself in the dining-room until I called anxiously, ‘Grandmother, I’m afraid the cakes are burning!’ Then she came laughing, waving her apron before her as if she were shooing chickens. ”

“ When it is of a deep bluish color, or of the soft silver-gray maltese without stripes, it is extremely handsome. The most desirable are the bluish lilac-colored ones, with soft fur like sealskin. The nose and pads of the feet are dark, and the eyes are orange yellow. The maltese and white cat when well marked is extremely handsome, and there is no prettier kitten than the maltese and white. ”

“ I am a Persian princess, as I said before, and I am travelling incognita to see the world and improve my mind, and also to rescue my brother, who is a Maltese prince and enchanted. My brother, when very young, went on his travels, was shipwrecked on the coast of Malta, and became a prince of that island. But he had enemies, and was enchanted. He is now a Maltese cat. I disguise myself as a cat in order to find him more readily. ”

“ A very spiteful-looking old Maltese cat, seeing that his son was under the gray, took it upon himself to interfere, whereupon another big cat who was, Aunt Tabby said, an uncle to the gray, also took it upon himself to interfere. ”

“ Felina, the great, splendid, Maltese mother of three beautiful blue kittens; Jack and Gill, the gentle, soft-toned Java sparrows; and Ruby, the unwearying canary singer, always in loud and uninterpretable conversation with San Rosa, the mocking-bird. The birds hung in the broad, deep window of the sitting-room, in the shade of the jasmine and honeysuckle vines that embowered it and filled the air with delicious perfume. The dog and cat, when not inclined to active enjoyments, were accommodated with comfortable beds in the adjoining apartment, which was the sleeping-room of their mistress. ”

“ Tabby is just as beautiful as she can be. A Maltese cat, with a white nose and two white front paws. She is very cunning, and knows almost everything within the domain of cat knowledge. If there is one thing I do love better than another, in the way of pets, it is cats. A clean-faced, sleek cat, sitting on the hearth-rug before the grate, is enough to give the whole [Pg 13] household a feeling of contentment. Then the kittens are always so funny and frolicksome! ”

“ Cats have often saved life; also houses from burning. At Geneva, N. Y., a child of three attempted to take a rattlesnake. A pet Maltese cat killed it, and saved the child. A similar thing happened in Pennsylvania.
A woman in New York City took into her house a stray and hungry cat. ”

“ My tawny Scotch terrier, Wye-I, always takes up his position on the purple plush cushion at one side of the fireplace, and the Maltese cat, Cattiva, on the crimson one opposite, by instinct, because most becoming severally to their complexions. The cat never catches mice. There are no mice in my castle for her to catch. ”

“ Now these birds were regarded by the farmers as a pest, and an overzealous government offered a bounty for their little feathered heads. Clem Humphries proved himself a valiant hunter of this puny prey. He boiled barley and then drew a stiff bristle through each grain. The sparrows ate and died, and Clem drank their blood-money.
But they still flourished. The cats waged war against them, and many a palpitant little breast was torn by their pointed teeth. The old Maltese cat at Deans' had perpetually a downy feather sticking to his cruel mouth, and his strong paws were ever stained with red. ”

“ Again the others looked at the cat in the box, and again they laughed heartily; but seeing Cobb so quiet, it at last dawned upon them that there was something peculiar in the surroundings of the animal.
In the box which had been brought out and placed upon the table was a large Maltese cat, lying upon its side on an asbestos pillow. The head of the [25] animal was wrapped with bandages, as was also the under part of the body for a space of about two inches above its thighs. ”

“ The sudden elongation and apparent telescoping of a cat's paw was a subject that for hours had kept him sleepless.
He had solved the riddle first by putting it down to some trick of his eyesight, but the keenness of his vision was proverbial in Jamestown, and that did not long content him. Then he took a tape-line and measured a paw, and waited for the stretching process. It came. The huge Maltese stretched out his forepaws in languorous indolence. Bing promptly caught one and began to measure; the cat instantly contracted its muscles. ”

“ Cats are often devoted to animals, as well as to persons. My own pet cat, Maltese and white, was the loving friend of my great St. Bernard dog, Bernie. When the mate of the Maltese died, the cat came to the dog, apparently for sympathy. For a year they walked together, shared their bed, and were like human friends. The dog died when six years old, and the lonely cat soon followed, and was buried beside Bernie.
We seem to be coming into a nobler civilization. ”

“ The cat was always in the room, and always expressed in the plainest way the opinion that I was a thief and a murderer, and an enemy of the temperance society. When I asked her what she meant to do, she would give me no reply except a fresh oath, or other bad language. Threats had no effect on her, for she knew that I could not touch her in Susan’s house, and she didn’t intend that I should catch her outside of the house. Nothing was clearer than that the Maltese was bound to make a quarrel between me and Susan in revenge for what I had said at Martha’s four o’clock milk. ”

“ My cat is a large blue Maltese, and his name is Ted. He is not quite two years old, and weighs ten and a half pounds. We have scales with a top just large enough for him to sit on, and he sits very still while he is getting weighed. He sits at the table in a high chair, and has a little piece of oil-cloth on which he rests his paws, and waits patiently until we give him something to eat. If we give him anything he does not like, he jumps right down. ”

“ So the little tiger-kitten did it over again, and really did it very well; and then the Maltese kittens tried it, and the barn-cat was very much pleased with them. “Now,” said the barn-cat, “we’ll make believe ’tis a mouse running. See how well you can do that!” and she gave the apple a push with her paw, and all the four kittens [Pg 162] set off at once after it, and rolled over one another and clawed and kicked just as they had done when they played “tag.” ”

“ He is a fine large maltese, and attracted a great deal of attention at the New York Cat Show in 1895. "We look upon him as an important member of our family," says Mrs. Stedman, "and think he knows as much as any of us. He despises our two other cats, but he is very fond of human beings and makes friends readily with strangers. He is always present at the family dinner table at meal-time and expects to have his share handed to him carefully. ”

“ There are, first, the European or Western cat, a short-haired animal; and secondly, the Asiatic or Eastern cat—called also Persian or Angora, according to the difference in the texture of the coat, it being exceedingly fine, soft, and satiny in the Angora, and not so much so in the Persian—a long-haired cat. All the others, such as Assyrian, Abyssinian, the Maltese, Russian, Chinese, Italian, French, Turkish, etc, are either inter-breeds between the two, or lineal descendants of the one or the other, altered and modified by climate and mode of life. ”

“ At about this period The Boy officiated at the funeral of another cat, but in a somewhat more exalted capacity. It was the Cranes’ cat, at Red Hook—a Maltese lady, who always had yellow kittens. The Boy does not remember the cause of the cat’s death, but he thinks that Uncle Andrew Knox ran over her, with the “dyspepsia-wagon”—so called because it had no springs. ”

“ An even more wonderful short-haired cat was "Mittens," who has actually been trained to love and live with birds. "Mittens" is a great deal of a swell. His grandfather was a pure-blooded Maltese, and his great-grandmamma was a very haughty Angora. All the traditions in his family prompted him to consider birds as his natural prey and dogs as his enemies. When he came to his present mistress, Mrs. ”

“ One was retained for the name of the thing,—called derivatively Maltesa, and Molly "for short." One was adopted for charity,—a hideous, saffron-hued, forlorn little wretch, left behind by a Milesian family, called, from its color, Aurora, contracted into Rory O'More. [Pg 659] The third was a fierce black-and-white unnamed wild creature, of whom one never got more than a glimpse in her savage flight. Cats are tolerated here from a tradition that they catch rats and mice, but they don't. We catch the mice ourselves and put them in a barrel, and put a cat in after them ”

“ And, for an instant, as he watched it, the doctor was aware that a faint uneasiness stirred in the depths of his own being, focusing itself for the moment upon this curious behaviour of the uncanny creature before him.
There rose in him quite a new realisation of the mystery connected with the whole feline tribe, but especially with that common member of it, the domestic cat—their hidden lives, their strange aloofness, their incalculable subtlety. How utterly remote from anything that human beings understood lay the sources of their elusive activities. ”

“ We only know that cats were always about the place when we were young and that some sixteen years ago we rescued a half starved Maltese kitten from a city pavement and kept her until she died of old age about a year ago. ”

“ We value our Cats too slightly because we detest their thievish propensities, fear their claws and love their enemy, the dog, and we are not able to show equal friendship and admiration for those two opposite natures.
“Let us examine the Cat’s qualities. We are impressed by its agility, yet its mind is as flexible as its body. Its cleanliness of habit is as much a matter of mental bias as physical choice, for it is constantly licking and cleaning itself. Every hair of its fur must be in perfect order; it never forgets as much as the tip of its tail. ”

“ With a fearsome yell, her clammy fur staring in clumps, her tail thick as a cable, her eyes flashing green as a chrysoprase, her distended claws entangling themselves so that she floundered across the carpet, a huge white cat rushed from somewhere, and made for the chimney. ”

“ The next time they woke, all the air, they said, inside and out, was full of cats. They swarmed—up and down, along and across, everywhere about the room. They felt their claws trying to get through the night-gowns lady Mara had put on them, but they could not; and in the morning not one of them had a scratch. Through the dark suddenly, came the only sound they heard the night long—the far-off howl of the huge great-grandmother-cat in the desert: she must have been calling her little ones, they thought, for that instant the cats stopped, and all was still. ”

“ If well treated black and white cats are apt to turn a little indolent and lazy, and if improperly fed and housed, they degenerate into the most wretched-looking specimens of felinity you ever looked upon. All the bad in their character comes out, and their good qualities are forgotten. Their coat gets dry, and tear, and are cinder-holed; and, instead of the plump, round-faced, clerical-looking cat which used to adorn your parlour window, you have a thin, emaciated, long-nosed, pigeon-loft-hunting, flower-unscraping, dirty, disreputable dunghill cat. ”

“ In praise of Tabby the Mariner,
Who discovered the Catskills, named for her.
CATASTROPHES
"And when Maeldune and his men went into the best of the houses they saw no one in it but a little cat that was in the middle of the house, and it playing about on the four stone pillars that were there, and leaping from one to another. It looked at the men for a short space, but it did not stop from its play."
—Lady Gregory's Book of Saints and Wonders.
People are people, and cats are cats. We do not know our pussies. We pet them but we cannot tame them. ”

“ The sedate matron is fully alive to the importance of the occasion, and has adopted an easy, graceful pose; while the youngster, frisky and somewhat shy, was with difficulty persuaded to settle comfortably down. Mother cat is an animal of very self-contained and amiable disposition. She has contracted a fast friendship with two white rabbits belonging to the coachman's little boy. They live in a hutch in the stables, and are often allowed a little liberty for a frolic with puss, who chases them in and out of an empty stall. ”

“ But the depredations still go on, and you cannot convince the honest old house-servant that a black cat has ever been killed—and looking out into the garden just now, as that sleek black rascal lies in the grass, with a waving motion of his tail and his yellow eye fixed upon a callow brood, it is clearer than ever before that the succession of black cats is eternal. ”

“ Its fur, he saw, was standing ridgewise upon its back; the ears were flattened back somewhat; the tail was switching sharply. The cat, of course, had wakened him with a purpose, and the instant he realized this, he set it upon the arm of the chair and sprang up with a quick turn to face the empty room behind him. By some curious instinct, his arms of their own accord assumed an attitude of defence in front of him, as though to ward off something that threatened his safety. Yet nothing was visible. Only shapes of fog hung about rather heavily in the air, moving slightly to and fro. ”