He suddenly got the insane idea that a fiend had thrust his head
in the door behind him and was mocking and grinning.
He turned and looked, and there sat an impudent little black cat
with big yellow eyes.
She had been sitting on her haunches blinking at him when he raised
his voice or gestured, and the crowd has never yet gathered on
this earth in the temple of Baal or Jehovah that can resist a cat
accompaniment to the functions of a priest.
When Gordon looked the little cat full in the face, she liked him
at once, and in the softest, friendliest treble said:
"Meow!"
And the crowd burst into incontrollable laughter.
At first the full import of the situation did not reach his mind,
he was so stunned with surprise. He stood looking at the cat in
helpless stupor, and blushing red. And then the sickening certainty
crushed him that the day was lost; that it was beyond the power
of human genius, or the reach of the spirit of God, to remove that
cat and regain control of his audience.
He turned sick with anger and humiliation, and his big bear-like
hands clasped his sheet of notes and slowly crushed them.
He continued to look at the cat and she cocked her head to one side,
opened her yellow eyes wider and, slowly, in grieved accents said:
"M-e-o-w!"
Which unmistakably meant, "I'm very sorry you don't like me as well
as I do you.
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