Indeed, a tale never was so plain that it gathered no colour in the telling. There was an old story of Whittington without a Cat,[23] and how the cat got into the story was more than the whole Society of Antiquaries could tell, though it met together in 1771 expressly to discuss the problem. In our own time, most antiquaries are agreed that the Cat found its way from Genoa or Persia or Portugal,—no matter whence,—and that it is a piece of folk-lore grafted upon authentic biography. Try as they will, they can get little nearer to the heart of the matter than Mr. Pepys, when he watched the puppet-show of Whittington at Southwark Fair, “which was pretty to see”, and remarked “how that idle thing do work upon people that see it, and even myself too”.