The Story
Long ago, in a small village in the English countryside, there lived an orphan boy named Richard Whittington, though everyone called him Dick. He had no family left and very little to eat, but he had heard, as all poor children had heard, that the streets of London were paved with gold.
One autumn morning, Dick tied everything he owned into a cloth, knotted it to a stick, and set off down the long road to London.
The streets, when he arrived, were not paved with gold. They were paved with mud, and horse dung, and cobblestones that hurt his feet through his thin shoes. Dick sat down on a doorstep in the cold and wondered if he had made a terrible mistake.
The house whose doorstep he had chosen belonged to a prosperous merchant named Fitzwarren. The cook found Dick there and was inclined to chase him off, but Mr. Fitzwarren arrived home just then and, being a kind man, offered the boy a place in the kitchen in exchange for work.
Dick swept and scrubbed and carried and fetched, sleeping in a small cold room in the attic where the rats and mice came out at night and ran across his face while he slept. He spent his first penny on a cat — a lean, battle-hardened tabby — and she cleared his room of mice within a week and slept at his feet every night after that.
Mr. Fitzwarren had a custom. When he sent his ships to trade in distant lands, he gave all the servants of his household the chance to send something of their own along, to be sold on their behalf. Dick had nothing in the world to send except his cat. He parted with her unwillingly, watching the ship sail away from the dock with a heavy heart.
Without his cat, the mice returned to his room, and the cook's temper was even sharper than usual, and London seemed darker and colder than ever. One bitter morning, before sunrise, Dick gathered his bundle and left. He had reached the top of the hill at Highgate when the church bells began to ring for the morning service.
And the bells, as bells sometimes do for those who listen closely enough, seemed to say something. They seemed to say: Turn again, Whittington, Lord Mayor of London.
Dick stopped on the hilltop and listened, and they rang it again. Turn again, Whittington, Lord Mayor of London.
It was a ridiculous thing for bells to say. But Dick was young enough and worn-down enough to believe in ridiculous things, and he turned around and walked back to the merchant's house.
Months later, Mr. Fitzwarren's ship returned from its voyage. The captain came to the house with extraordinary news. The ship had stopped at the court of a king in Morocco, a kingdom so plagued by rats and mice that the banquet table itself was overrun before the food could be eaten. When the cat was brought out from the hold, she set to work with magnificent efficiency. The king was so astonished and delighted — he had never seen a cat before — that he bought her for a price that was, by any measure, a fortune: gold and jewels piled onto the ship until it sat heavy in the water.
All of it belonged to Dick Whittington.
Mr. Fitzwarren settled the payment honestly and without a penny held back, and Dick, who had arrived in London with nothing, was now a wealthy young man. He used his fortune wisely, invested carefully, grew wiser and more respected each year, and in time was elected Alderman and then — just as the bells had promised on that cold hilltop morning — Lord Mayor of London. Three times over, in fact.
He never forgot where he had come from. He built almshouses and a library and repaired the city's water pipes. He was remembered long after his death not for his gold, but for his goodness.
And somewhere in the ledgers of history, the entry for his fortune reads simply: one cat.