Sherry Chandler » Cat with abolitionist
Cat with abolitionist
Calvin was given to me eight years ago by Mrs. Stowe, but she knew nothing of his age or origin. He walked into her house one day out of the great unknown and became at once at home, as if he had been always a friend of the family. He appeared to have artistic and literary tastes, and it was as if he had inquired at the door if that was the residence of the author of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, and, upon being assured that it was, had decided to dwell there. This is, of course, fanciful, for his antecedants were wholly unknown, but in his time he could hardly have been in any household where he would not have heard Uncle Tom’s Cabin talked about. When he came to Mrs. Stowe, he was as large as he ever was, and apparently as old as he ever became. Yet there was in him no appearance of age; he was in the happy maturity of his powers, and you would rather have said in that maturity he had found the secret of perpetual youth. And it was as difficult to believe that he would ever be aged as it was to imagine that he had ever been in immature youth. There was in him a mysterious perpetuity.
—from Charles Dudley Warner, “Calvin, the Cat,” text from Roger Caras’ Treasury of Great Cat Stories (Galahad Books, 1987)
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2 Comments
1. Tommy replies at 8th June 2007, 9:14 am :
I am on your lawnchair, misappropriating your sunbeams!
2. sherry replies at 9th June 2007, 4:57 am :
Actually, Tommy, I think that has become his lawnchair.
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