The three-legged cat
The hermitage of Cyrillius (*) was once owned by a magician named Kitzele. Theof rid the Learned was abbot of the Benedictines.
Kitzele was supreme in the haunted wood and mobilized his noisome retainers to plague the good people of the town. Theof rid prayed that the community might be freed from these sundry devils, but he neglected to pray for himself. Whereupon the demons went back to their wood and appointed seven of their number to visit upon the abbot all the troubles hitherto distributed about the village.
By various unnamed expedients the abbot succeeded in ridding himself of all of the fiends but one who had taken the form of a black cat. All night long this cat would howl at his window, keeping him from sleep and disturbing his pious meditations.
This persecution went on for several weeks, until one night the good abbot set a trap outside his window. The cat came to howl as usual, stepped into a noose of linen cord, and was speedily snared. Theofrid dragged the spitting, yowling quarry into his cell and chopped off one of its paws.
The cat leaped out at the window, but the abbot threw the paw into the fire and scattered the ashes. By this simple method he had condemned the demon to go through eternity beneath the hide of a cat; for not until the evil creature should be able to reassemble the parts of his enchanted body would he be able to reassume his natural shape.
The magician Kitzele was never seen again, but a three-legged cat still roams the woods, especially on nights when there is no moon.
