sufficient to earn for her the reputation of a witch. It would be idle,
of course, to expect people in these unmeditative times to believe there
was ever the remotest truth underlying these so-called phantastic
suppositions of the past; yet, according to reliable testimony, there
are, at the present moment, many houses in England haunted by phantasms
in the form of black cats, of so sinister and hostile an appearance,
that one can only assume that unless they are the actual spirits of
cats, earthbound through cruel and vicious propensities, they must be
vice-elementals, i.e. spirits that have never inhabited any material
body, and which have either been generated by vicious thoughts, or else
have been attracted elsewhere to a spot by some crime or vicious act
once perpetrated there. Vice-elemental is merely the modern name for
fiend or demon.

"Apart from his luciferan qualities, the cat was awarded all sorts of
other qualities, not the least important of which was its prophetic
capability. If a cat washed its face, rainy weather was regarded as
inevitable; if a cat frolicked on the deck of a ship, it was a sure sign
of a storm; whilst if a live ember fell on a cat, an earthquake shock
would speedily be felt. Cats, too, were reputed the harbingers of good
and bad fortune. Not a person in Normandy but believed, at one time,
that the spectacle of a tortoiseshell cat, climbing a tree, foretold
death from accident, and that a black cat crossing one's path, in the
moonlight, presaged death from an epidemic. Two black cats viewed in the
open between 4 and 7 a.m. were generally believed to predict a death;
whereas a strange white cat, heard mewing on a doorstep, was loudly
welcomed as the indication of an approaching marriage. According to
tradition, one learns that cats were occasionally made use of in
medicine; to cure peasants of skin diseases, French sorcerers sprinkling
the afflicted parts with three drops of blood drawn from the vein under