Floyd's Flowers Or Duty and Beauty For Colored Children Being One Hundred Short Stories Gleaned from the Storehouse of Human Knowledge and Experience Simple Amusing Elevating — A Little Sailor Cat

LXXXVIII. THE LITTLE SAILOR CAT.

In September, 1893, grouped on the Fall River Line pier at the foot of Warren Street, New York, there stood a party of twenty-three sailors waiting for the Puritan to take them on to Boston.

The central figure in the group—a short, thickset man, with bronzed and grizzled moustache—stood erect with arms folded over his chest.

Upon the solid foundation thus made nestled a little white kitten.

The man and the kitten were the Boston contingent of the crew of the steamship City of Savannah, which had been wrecked the week before on Hunting Island, off the South Carolina coast.

[Illustration: THE LITTLE SAILOR CAT.

] The story of the beaching of the steamship and of the taking off of her crew by the City of Birmingham had been told in all the newspapers, but nothing had been said about the cat, so the Boston Herald said.

Before the shipwreck the cat was nothing more than an ordinary ship’s cat, and the captain had named him Mascot; but that was the end of his distinction.

After the disaster, nevertheless, all the sailors swore that the kitten was as good a sailor as any of them.

“He’s a wonder,” said the short, thickset man, surveying the cat proudly; “nobody thought of him in the rush, but he got there just the same.

He climbed the rigging in that gale like an old tar and held on for hours.

He wasn’t a bit frightened either.

Only he would ‘caterwaul’ when he got hungry.

We were on board of the boat fifty hours after she struck before the sea was such that we could be taken off in boats.

At night the captain ordered all the crew into the rigging and made us stay there.

We each took a piece of rope and lashed ourselves on, so as to keep from falling off when asleep.

That’s what the captain said the string was for, but I never slept at all.

I don’t think many others did.

The cat got along without any rope, and she was there in the morning all right.

When we got away at last, nearly crazy with thirst and so faint that we could hardly climb down the ‘Jacob’s ladder’ into the Birmingham’s boats, that little fellow climbed out of his nest in the rigging and wanted to go too.

We were glad to take him.

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