the probably elderly and dyspeptic gentleman who has had his luncheon filched away almost from under his nose.  If we were quite sure that it was from No. 14, and not from No. 9 or No. 11, that the fish had been stolen, we might—­conceivably—­call round and offer to pay for it.  But with a cat one is never quite sure.  And we cannot call round on all the neighbours and make a general announcement that our cat is a thief.  In any case the next move lies with the wronged neighbour.  As day follows day, and there is no sign of his irate and murder-bent figure advancing up the path, we recover our mental balance and begin to see the cat’s exploit in a new light.  We do not yet extol it on moral grounds, but undoubtedly, the more we think of it, the deeper becomes our admiration.  Of the two great heroes of the Greeks we admire one for his valour and one for his cunning.  The epic of the cat is the epic of Odysseus.  The old gentleman with the Dover sole gradually assumes the aspect of a Polyphemus outwitted—­outwitted and humiliated to the point of not even being able to throw things after his tormentor.  Clever cat!  Nobody else’s cat could have done such a thing.  We should like to celebrate the Rape of the Dover Sole in Latin verse.

As for the Achillean sort of prowess, we do not demand it of a cat, but we are proud of it when it exists.  There is a pleasure in seeing strange cats fly at his approach, either in single file over the wall or in the scattered aimlessness of a bursting bomb.  Theoretically, we hate him to fight, but, if he does fight and comes home with a torn ear, we have to summon up all the resources of our finer nature in order not to rejoice on noticing that the cat next door looks as though it had been through a railway accident.  I am sorry for the cat next door.  I hate him so, and it must be horrible to be hated.  But he should not sit on my wall and look at me with yellow eyes.  If his eyes were any other colour—­even the blue that is now said to be the mark of the runaway husband—­I feel certain I could just manage to endure him.  But they are the sort of yellow eyes that you expect to see looking out at you from a hole in the panelling in a novel by Mr Sax Rohmer.  The only reason why I am not frightened of them is that the cat is so obviously frightened of me.  I never did him any injury unless to hate is to injure.  But he lowers his head when I appear as though he expected to be guillotined.  He does not run away:  he merely crouches like a guilty thing.  Perhaps he remembers how often he has stepped delicately over my seed-beds, but not so delicately as to leave no mark of ruin among the infant lettuces and the less-than-infant autumn-sprouting broccoli.  These things I could forgive him, but it is not easy to forgive him the look in his eyes when he watches a bird at its song.  They are ablaze with evil.  He becomes a sort of Jack the Ripper at the opera.  People tell us that we should not blame cats for this sort of thing—­that