An Old Saying
Surely, says one reader, the point about spring kittens is that they can be house-trained more cosily when the soil is dug in the garden, and another writes that it is •a Somerset belief that "Tis May kittens bean't no good.' although -the same person tells me that he has a May-born mouser that is the best he has ever known. There is no doubting that it is an old belief that May kittens are no good, for a lady who used to live in Wales quotes me a Welsh saying used more than fifty years ago: ' Cathod mis Mai, ddodant nadrodd mewn tai '—eats born in May bring snakes into the house. ' When I was a small child many years ago, I was walking with my father in the Monmouthshire hills,' she remarks. 'and stopped by a mountain stream from which sprang a half-wild cat bearing something squirming in its mouth. My father quoted the old Welsh proverb. I have heard it more than once from our old servants, but in English.' I wonder again about this allusion to snakes and newts and I am- still not sure why May or blackberry kittens are no good unless, as the proverb suggests, they do such alarming things.
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