But Mentu himself was once nearly petrified by a very awful kind of Gorgon. He was tripping and smelling, and coming to the edge of a little stone well he looked in. Suddenly we saw him turn rigid, with a face of inexpressible horror. He stood statue-like for a moment, then lifting silent paws retired backwards noiselessly, imperceptibly, step by step from the edge. Once out of sight of the pool he turned and fled. I went to look in. A frog sat there.
Sometimes we went down a stony winding path to the cove beneath; a wren was building here, for the cock-wren sat on a bush and girded at Mentu as he passed. One day I heard from far below the sharp note whirring like a tiny watchman’s rattle, and returned to find Mentu lying on the path with swishing tail cruelly eyeing the atom which scolded him from above.
When the time came to go home Mentu had undergone another transformation. He had trebled in size; he had lost the rough, reddish “kitten hair”; his coat was shining, silky, ashen-grey; his eyes were the colour of hock. Blue Persians were not plentiful in Cornwall, and a little crowd followed us up and down the platform, for Mentu travelled no longer in a basket.
In the train he was perfectly calm; looked out of the window at stations, and regarded railway officials with an impartial and critical eye. A fellow traveller pronounced him “a kind of dog-cat,” alluding, we supposed, to his intelligent and self-possessed demeanour as he sat upright on his mistress’ lap.
We parted again, and from time to time I had accounts of Mentu. In spring time he relinquished the pursuits of shadows in favour of less innocuous sport. He was found curled up in a blackbird’s nest, meditating on the capital dinner he had made of the inhabitants. He laid little offerings of dead, unfledged birds on his mistress’ chair or footstool. He was seen trotting across the lawn, his head thrown proudly back, so that the nest he was bringing her should clear the ground. Saddest of all, she hung up a cocoanut for the tits outside her window, and a dead blue-tit was soon laid at her feet.
Again, it was said that he appeared suddenly, like the Cheshire cat, on a tree miles from home; and in early autumn, in the morning, he was seen crossing the lawn with a train of seventeen angry pheasants behind him.