A correspondent of the Salt Lake Contributor thus describes the suffering of the cats in the bombardment of Alexandria :

" But one feature of the scene (so it seemed to me) that ought to have struck every man in describing the bombarded city of Alexandria, was the immense number of bombarded and starving cats. I had read description after description of the ruined city, but none of them ever said a word about the cats. The writers told me how shells had blown houses to pieces, described all kinds of horrors, and satiated me with catastrophe and skeletons, but no one said a word about cats. Now, it was perfectly impossible to go into Alexandria after the bombardment and then to sit down and write about it, or stand up and talk about it, and not mention the cats. In fact, the whole place was cats! I never saw such 'felisity' in my life. If you turned the corner you would find a hundred - I am talking liberally, of course - one hundred cats sitting on the ruins of a single house. Go a little farther and you would see two hundred. On the remains of what had been the bank of London, it was stated in a telegram that the writer counted three hundred and seventeen cats ! New arrivals were moved with pity for the poor animals, but the result of sympathy was always disastrous. Your pity was ruined and destroyed by the immediate rush of paupers.

If you produced a mutton chop for one cat, there were three hundred cats waiting next time for three hundred mutton chops. That made charity look rather a serious matter. After the second day the people, instead of taking mutton chops to the cats, would take revolvers and shoot them."