Warder

Kent. Mortimer, ’tis I. But hath thy portion wrought so happily? Younger Mortimer. It hath, my lord: the warders all asleep, I thank them, gave me leave to pass in peace.

Above the gloomy portal arch, / Timing his footsteps to a march, / The warder kept his guard, / Low humming, as he paced along, / Some ancient Border gathering song.

So the guards carried him to the jail, thinking to lay him by the heels there for the night; but, when the warders saw his beauty and loveliness, they could not find it in their hearts to imprison him: they made him sit with them without the walls; and, when food came to them, he ate with them what sufficed him.

Nobody else spoke, but they noticed the long stripes on Okonkwo’s back where the warder’s whip had cut into his flesh.

The conspicuous position thus accorded to the cat as a warder-off of evil fortune seems oddly paralleled, though not imitated, by the place accorded to the same animal in popular European folklore.

1595, Samuel Daniel, Civil Wars, in The Poetical Works of Mr. Samuel Daniel, Volume II, London: R. Gosling, 1718, Book I, stanza 62, p. 25, When, lo! the king chang’d suddenly his Mind, Casts down his Warder to arrest them there;

Stay, the king hath thrown his warder down.

If thou doſt not inſtantly comply with theſe juſt demands, he defies thee to ſingle combat to the laſt extremity. And ſo ſaying, the Herald caſt down his warder.