Thomasina - The Cat Who Thought She Was God Read Free Page B

sentimental interest in them whatsoever, and hence never paid the slightest attention to me from the moment I came into the house, which I cannot say disturbed me. The disregard was mutual.
    We lived in a large, rather gloomy house on Dunear Street, which Mr. MacDhui had inherited from his father, who was also a veterinarian when he died. The two lower floors were given over to the offices, surgery, and animal hospital and we lived on the two upper ones; Mr. MacDhui, his wife, and Mary Ruadh. They all had red hair. I have too, or rather ginger-colored with a white blaze on my chest. But what people really seem to find irresistible about me is that I have four white feet, and the very tip of my tail is white to match. I am quite used to receiving compliments upon my looks and bearing.
    Although I was then only six months old myself, I remember Mary Ruadh’s mother, Anne. She was beautiful and her hair was the color of the copper pots by the fireside. She was very gay and always singing about the house, which made it less dark and gloomy, even on rainy days. She was forever cuddling and spoiling Mary Ruadh and they would often spend time “giving one another whispers," which was a kind of love-making. It was not an unhappy household, in spite of Mr. MacDhui. But it did not last long, for soon after I came Mrs. MacDhui contracted a disease from a parrot that was being kept in the hospital, and died.
    That was a bad time for me, I can tell you, and if it had not been for Mrs. McKenzie I do not know what would have happened to me, for Mr. MacDhui half went out of his mind, they said, and it certainly sounded like it, the manner in which he raged and carried on, and the love he had had for his wife he now transferred to his daughter, and half frightened her to death with it, and me too, I can assure you. He kept staying away from home and would not go near the hospital for days on end and things were getting in a bad state when he received a visit from an old friend of his from the country, a minister by the name of Mr. Peddie, and after that things got a little better and soon we had a great change.
    It seems that Mr. Peddie and Mr. MacDhui had known one another when they were both students at Edinburgh University—they might even have known some of my family there—and Mr. Peddie told Mr. MacDhui that there was a practice for sale in the town where he lived and advised him to go there.
    So. Mr. MacDhui sold out his practice in Glasgow and the house on Dunear Street where he was brought up, and we all moved to Inveranoch on the west bank of Loch Fyne in Argyllshire, where my tragedy happened to me.
    Mary Ruadh then was six years old, going on seven, and we lived in the last house but one near the end of Argyll Lane. Our next-door neighbor was Mr. MacDhui’s friend, Mr. Angus Peddie, the minister, who kept a most disgusting pug dog by the name of Fin. Ugh!
    Our house was really two houses, one next the other, but separated, and they were of whitewashed stone with slate roofs; they were rather long and narrow, two stories high, with tall chimneys at each end, on which there was usually perched a sea gull. In one of these we lived and in the adjoining one was the office, waiting room, surgery, and hospital of Mr. MacDhui. But of course we never went there, for Mary Ruadh was forbidden to do so. After what had happened in Glasgow, Mr. MacDhui had sworn he would never again have sick animals in the place where he lived.
    I considered myself a good deal better off in Inveranoch than in Glasgow because Loch Fyne was an arm of the sea that pushed up from the ocean down by Greenock right up into the Highlands as far as Cairndow and brought with it gulls to watch in flight and the smell of the sea and fish and queer birds to chase that ran along the beach, behind which lay a wonderful dark and scary country of woods and glens and mountains of stone in which to hunt. I was never allowed out in Glasgow, but it was quite different here and