For the most wild, yet most homely  narrative which I am about to pen,  

I neither expect nor solicit belief. Mad indeed  would I be to expect it, in a case where my very  

senses reject their own evidence. Yet, mad  am I not—and very surely do I not dream.  

But to-morrow I die, and to-day I would unburthen  my soul. My immediate purpose is to place before  

the world, plainly, succinctly, and without  comment, a series of mere household events.  

In their consequences, these events have  terrified—have tortured—have destroyed me.  

Yet I will not attempt to expound them. To  me, they have presented little but horror—to  

many they will seem less terrible than barroques.  Hereafter, perhaps, some intellect may be found  

which will reduce my phantasm to the  common-place—some intellect more calm,  

more logical, and far less excitable than my  own, which will perceive, in the circumstances  

I detail with awe, nothing more than an ordinary  succession of very natural causes and effects.  

From my infancy I was noted for the  docility and humanity of my disposition.  

My tenderness of heart was even so conspicuous  as to make me the jest of my companions.  

I was especially fond of animals, and was indulged  by my parents with a great variety of pets.  

With these I spent most of my time, and never  was so happy as when feeding and caressing them.  

This peculiarity of character grew  with my growth, and in my manhood,  

I derived from it one of my principal sources  of pleasure. To those who have cherished an  

affection for a faithful and sagacious  dog, I need hardly be at the trouble  

of explaining the nature or the intensity of the  gratification thus derivable. There is something  

in the unselfish and self-sacrificing love of a  brute, which goes directly to the heart of him  

who has had frequent occasion to test the paltry  friendship and gossamer fidelity of mere Man.  

I married early, and was happy to find in my  wife a disposition not uncongenial with my own.  

Observing my partiality for domestic pets,  she lost no opportunity of procuring those  

of the most agreeable kind. We had birds,  gold-fish, a fine dog, rabbits, a small monkey,  

and a cat. This latter was a  

remarkably large and beautiful animal, entirely  black, and sagacious to an astonishing degree.  

In speaking of his intelligence, my wife,  who at heart was not a little tinctured  

with superstition, made frequent allusion to the  ancient popular notion, which regarded all black  

cats as witches in disguise. Not that she was  ever serious upon this point—and I mention the  

matter at all for no better reason than that  it happens, just now, to be remembered.  

Pluto—this was the cat's name—was  my favorite pet and playmate.  

I alone fed him, and he attended  me wherever I went about the house.  

It was even with difficulty that I could prevent  him from following me through the streets.  

Our friendship lasted, in this manner, for several  years, during which my general temperament and  

character—through the instrumentality of the  Fiend Intemperance—had (I blush to confess it)  

experienced a radical alteration for the worse. I  grew, day by day, more moody, more irritable, more  

regardless of the feelings of others. I suffered  myself to use intemperate language to my wife.  

At length, I even offered her personal violence.  

My pets, of course, were made to  feel the change in my disposition.  

I not only neglected, but ill-used them. For  Pluto, however, I still retained sufficient  

regard to restrain me from maltreating him, as  I made no scruple of maltreating the rabbits,  

the monkey, or even the dog, when by accident,  or through affection, they came in my way.  

But my disease grew upon me—for  what disease is like Alcohol!—and  

at length even Pluto, who was now becoming  old, and consequently somewhat peevish—even  

Pluto began to experience the  effects of my ill temper.  

One night, returning home, much intoxicated,  from one of my haunts about town,  

I fancied that the cat avoided my presence. I  seized him; when, in his fright at my violence,  

he inflicted a slight wound upon my hand with his  teeth. The fury of a demon instantly possessed  

me. I knew myself no longer. My original soul  seemed, at once, to take its flight from my body  

and a more than fiendish malevolence,  gin-nurtured, thrilled every fibre of my frame.  

I took from my waistcoat-pocket a pen-knife,  opened it, grasped the poor beast by the throat,  

and deliberately cut one of  its eyes from the socket!  

I blush, I burn, I shudder, while  I pen the damnable atrocity.  

When reason returned with the morning—when I  had slept off the fumes of the night's debauch—I  

experienced a sentiment half of horror, half of  remorse, for the crime of which I had been guilty;  

but it was, at best, a feeble and equivocal  feeling, and the soul remained untouched.  

I again plunged into excess, and soon  drowned in wine all memory of the deed.  

In the meantime the cat slowly recovered.  The socket of the lost eye presented,  

it is true, a frightful appearance, but  he no longer appeared to suffer any pain.  

He went about the house as usual, but, as might be  expected, fled in extreme terror at my approach.  

I had so much of my old heart left, as to be  at first grieved by this evident dislike on the  

part of a creature which had once so loved me.  But this feeling soon gave place to irritation.  

And then came, as if to my final and irrevocable  overthrow, the spirit of PERVERSENESS.  

Of this spirit philosophy takes no account.  Yet I am not more sure that my soul lives,  

than I am that perverseness is one of the  primitive impulses of the human heart—one of  

the indivisible primary faculties, or sentiments,  which give direction to the character of Man.  

Who has not, a hundred times, found  himself committing a vile or a silly  

action, for no other reason than  because he knows he should not?  

Have we not a perpetual inclination, in the  teeth of our best judgment, to violate that  

which is Law, merely because we understand  it to be such? This spirit of perverseness,  

I say, came to my final overthrow. It was this  unfathomable longing of the soul to vex itself—to  

offer violence to its own nature—to do  wrong for the wrong's sake only—that  

urged me to continue and finally to consummate the  injury I had inflicted upon the unoffending brute.  

One morning, in cool blood, I slipped a noose  about its neck and hung it to the limb of a  

tree;—hung it with the tears streaming from  my eyes, and with the bitterest remorse at my  

heart;—hung it because I knew that it had loved  me, and because I felt it had given me no reason  

of offence;—hung it because I knew that in so  doing I was committing a sin—a deadly sin that  

would so jeopardize my immortal soul as to  place it—if such a thing wore possible—even  

beyond the reach of the infinite mercy of  the Most Merciful and Most Terrible God.  

On the night of the day on which this cruel  deed was done, I was aroused from sleep by  

the cry of fire. The curtains of my bed were in  flames. The whole house was blazing. It was with  

great difficulty that my wife, a servant, and  myself, made our escape from the conflagration.  

The destruction was complete. My  entire worldly wealth was swallowed up,  

and I resigned myself thenceforward to despair.  

I am above the weakness of seeking to establish a  sequence of cause and effect, between the disaster  

and the atrocity. But I am detailing a chain  of facts—and wish not to leave even a possible  

link imperfect. On the day succeeding the fire, I  visited the ruins. The walls, with one exception,  

had fallen in. This exception was found  in a compartment wall, not very thick,  

which stood about the middle of the house, and  against which had rested the head of my bed.  

The plastering had here, in great measure,  resisted the action of the fire—a fact which  

I attributed to its having been recently spread.  About this wall a dense crowd were collected, and  

many persons seemed to be examining a particular  portion of it with very minute and eager  

attention. The words “strange!” “singular!” and  other similar expressions, excited my curiosity.  

I approached and saw, as if graven  in bas relief upon the white surface,  

the figure of a gigantic cat. The impression  was given with an accuracy truly marvellous.  

There was a rope about the animal's neck.  

When I first beheld this apparition—for I could  scarcely regard it as less—my wonder and my terror  

were extreme. But at length reflection came to  my aid. The cat, I remembered, had been hung in  

a garden adjacent to the house. Upon the alarm  of fire, this garden had been immediately filled  

by the crowd—by some one of whom the animal must  have been cut from the tree and thrown, through  

an open window, into my chamber. This had probably  been done with the view of arousing me from sleep.  

The falling of other walls had compressed  the victim of my cruelty into the substance  

of the freshly-spread plaster; the  lime of which, with the flames,  

and the ammonia from the carcass, had then  accomplished the portraiture as I saw it.  

Although I thus readily accounted to my reason,  if not altogether to my conscience, for the  

startling fact just detailed, it did not the less  fail to make a deep impression upon my fancy.  

For months I could not rid myself  of the phantasm of the cat;  

and, during this period, there came back into my  spirit a half-sentiment that seemed, but was not,  

remorse. I went so far as to regret the  loss of the animal, and to look about me,  

among the vile haunts which I now habitually  frequented, for another pet of the same species,  

and of somewhat similar appearance,  with which to supply its place.  

One night as I sat, half stupefied,  in a den of more than infamy,  

my attention was suddenly drawn to some  black object, reposing upon the head of one  

of the immense hogsheads of gin, or of rum, which  constituted the chief furniture of the apartment.  

I had been looking steadily at the  top of this hogshead for some minutes,  

and what now caused me surprise was the fact that  I had not sooner perceived the object thereupon.  

I approached it, and touched it with my  hand. It was a black cat—a very large  

one—fully as large as Pluto, and closely  resembling him in every respect but one.  

Pluto had not a white hair upon any portion  of his body; but this cat had a large,  

although indefinite splotch of white, covering  nearly the whole region of the breast.  

Upon my touching him, he immediately arose,  purred loudly, rubbed against my hand,  

and appeared delighted with my notice. This, then,  was the very creature of which I was in search.  

I at once offered to purchase it of the landlord;  but this person made no claim to it—knew nothing  

of it—had never seen it before. I continued my caresses, and,  

when I prepared to go home, the animal  evinced a disposition to accompany me.  

I permitted it to do so; occasionally stooping  and patting it as I proceeded. When it reached the  

house it domesticated itself at once, and became  immediately a great favorite with my wife.  

For my own part, I soon found a  dislike to it arising within me.  

This was just the reverse  of what I had anticipated;  

but—I know not how or why it was—its evident  fondness for myself rather disgusted and annoyed.  

By slow degrees, these feelings of disgust and  annoyance rose into the bitterness of hatred.  

I avoided the creature; a certain sense of shame,  

and the remembrance of my former deed of cruelty,  preventing me from physically abusing it.  

I did not, for some weeks, strike,  or otherwise violently ill use it;  

but gradually—very gradually—I came to  look upon it with unutterable loathing,  

and to flee silently from its odious presence,  as from the breath of a pestilence.  

What added, no doubt, to my hatred of the  beast, was the discovery, on the morning  

after I brought it home, that, like Pluto,  it also had been deprived of one of its eyes.  

This circumstance, however, only endeared it to  my wife, who, as I have already said, possessed,  

in a high degree, that humanity of feeling  which had once been my distinguishing trait,  

and the source of many of my  simplest and purest pleasures.  

With my aversion to this cat, however, its  partiality for myself seemed to increase. It  

followed my footsteps with a pertinacity which it  would be difficult to make the reader comprehend.  

Whenever I sat, it would crouch beneath my chair,  or spring upon my knees, covering me with its  

loathsome caresses. If I arose to walk it would  get between my feet and thus nearly throw me down,  

or, fastening its long and sharp claws in my  dress, clamber, in this manner, to my breast.  

At such times, although I longed  to destroy it with a blow,  

I was yet withheld from so doing, partly by  a memory of my former crime, but chiefly—let  

me confess it at once—by  absolute dread of the beast.  

This dread was not exactly a dread of physical  evil—and yet I should be at a loss how otherwise  

to define it. I am almost ashamed to own—yes,  even in this felon's cell, I am almost ashamed  

to own—that the terror and horror with which the  animal inspired me, had been heightened by one  

of the merest chimaeras it would be possible  to conceive. My wife had called my attention,  

more than once, to the character of the mark of  white hair, of which I have spoken, and which  

constituted the sole visible difference between  the strange beast and the one I had destroyed.  

The reader will remember that this mark, although  large, had been originally very indefinite;  

but, by slow degrees—degrees nearly imperceptible,  and which for a long time my reason struggled  

to reject as fanciful—it had, at length,  assumed a rigorous distinctness of outline.  

It was now the representation of an object  that I shudder to name—and for this, above all,  

I loathed, and dreaded, and would have  rid myself of the monster had I dared—it  

was now, I say, the image of a hideous—of  a ghastly thing—of the GALLOWS!—oh,  

mournful and terrible engine of Horror  and of Crime—of Agony and of Death!  

And now was I indeed wretched beyond  the wretchedness of mere Humanity.  

And a brute beast —whose fellow I had  contemptuously destroyed—a brute beast  

to work out for me—for me a man, fashioned in the  image of the High God—so much of insufferable woe!  

Alas! neither by day nor by night  knew I the blessing of rest any more!  

During the former the creature left me no  moment alone, and in the latter I started  

hourly from dreams of unutterable fear to find the  hot breath of the thing upon my face, and its vast