Arizona Silver Belt

Twenty Tons of Embalmed Cats.

A startling sale has just taken place in Liverpool. It consisted of an auction, held by Messrs. Leventon & Co., consignees, of 180,000 cats. They represent, in fact, a little less than twenty tons of Egyptian history; a little less than twenty tons of the household love and the music of the great, storied, and pyramided cat farm of antiquity, the Nile empire of twenty centuries gone by. Their discovery is an interesting story. It was made by a fellah, who, while employed in husbandry, fell into a pit. This pit had an opening, and he entered the opening. A subterranean chamber developed itself, followed by other subterranean chambers. All was silent, strangely silent, for a temple of even cat ghosts. In these chambers were laid away, shelf on shelf, and pile on pile, small yellow bundles. There were limitless bundles stretching through the gloom of seemingly endless mortuary halls. He unwrapped one and found it to be a cat. They were all cats, embalmed, swathed, and wrapped up like mummies to protect them from the cold and microbes of later and degenerate eras. Satisfying himself of the extent of the cat mine, he told his master. His master presumably wrote to the editor of the Luxor 'Answers to Correspondents' to ask him confidentially what he would do with 180,000 cats if he had them, and by this means the master came into conference with an Alexandrian speculator. The speculator found that the supply already exceeded the demand in the cat market, but tried Liverpool as a venture. The British merchant met the expectation, and promptly offered them as fertilizing material for farms. The consignment represented only the amount left after the Egyptian farmers had glutted themselves and their lands with the tabbies which laborers dug out by hundreds of thousands. The cat cemetery had long been suspected as existing, and its discovery created no small excitement in Beni Hassan, about 100 miles from Cairo, where it lies. - London edition N. Y. World.