A REVOLT OF THE GODS

My father was a deodorizer of dead dogs, my mother kept the only shop for the sale of cats’-meat in my native city.  They did not live happily; the difference in social rank was a chasm which could not be bridged by the vows of marriage.  It was indeed an ill-assorted and most unlucky alliance; and as might have been foreseen it ended in disaster.  One morning after the customary squabbles at breakfast, my father rose from the table, quivering and pale with wrath, and proceeding to the parsonage thrashed the clergyman who had performed the marriage ceremony.  The act was generally condemned and public feeling ran so high against the offender that people would permit dead dogs to lie on their property until the fragrance was deafening rather than employ him; and the municipal authorities suffered one bloated old mastiff to utter itself from a public square in so clamorous an exhalation that passing strangers supposed themselves to be in the vicinity of a saw-mill.  My father was indeed unpopular.  During these dark days the family’s sole dependence was on my mother’s emporium for cats’-meat.

The business was profitable.  In that city, which was the oldest in the world, the cat was an object of veneration.  Its worship was the religion of the country.  The multiplication and addition of cats were a perpetual instruction in arithmetic.  Naturally, any inattention to the wants of a cat was punished with great severity in this world and the next; so my good mother numbered her patrons by the hundred.  Still, with an unproductive husband and seventeen children she had some difficulty in making both ends cats’-meat; and at last the necessity of increasing the discrepancy between the cost price and the selling price of her carnal wares drove her to an expedient which proved eminently disastrous:  she conceived the unlucky notion of retaliating by refusing to sell cats’-meat until the boycott was taken off her husband.

On the day when she put this resolution into practice the shop was thronged with excited customers, and others extended in turbulent and restless masses up four streets, out of sight.  Inside there was nothing but cursing, crowding, shouting and menace.  Intimidation was freely resorted to—­several of my younger brothers and sisters being threatened with cutting up for the cats—­but my mother was as firm as a rock, and the day was a black one for Sardasa, the ancient and sacred city that was the scene of these events.  The lock-out was vigorously maintained, and seven hundred and fifty thousand cats went to bed hungry!

The next morning the city was found to have been placarded during the night with a proclamation of the Federated Union of Old Maids.  This ancient and powerful order averred through its Supreme Executive Head that the boycotting of my father and the retaliatory lock-out of my mother were seriously imperiling the interests of religion.  The proclamation went on to state that if arbitration were not adopted by noon that day all the old maids of the federation would strike—­and strike they did.