Cat's Cradle: A random triptych

Here are three cats and three cradles.

They all tell the same story*,

but they tell it very differently.

An illustration from 

Dutch Fairy Tales for Young Folks

by William Elliot Griffs.

The cat in this story is Dubbelje, because she is twice as loving. 

A Flood (1870) J.E. Millais

The kitten in this painting was part of Millais'  household: Eel-eye was "an evil minded little miscreant, but its moral defects were forgotten in the halo of Art with which it was held to be invested." —John Guille Millais, The Life and Letters of Sir John Everett Millais

The Inundation of The Biesbosch in 1421 (1856)

L. Alma-Tadema.

I have no idea what this cat's name was, but it looks authentically worried.

You should never abandon your story because it has been told—every story has been told. 

My own little boy at Kinderdijk in winter.

*Actually, there is more than one story about babies in cradles swept away by floods and the noble cats who accompanied them—sailing the storm deep and keeping the cradle upright through the night. Here the story occurs in Sheffield in 1864; there it happened in the lowlands during the middle ages and the cradle comes ashore at Kinderdijk.