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