Editing Maltese cat (section)

==Cultural references==
In literature, "The Maltese Cat" is the title of a 1895 [[short story]] (in the collection "[[The Day's Work]]") by [[Rudyard Kipling]].<ref>{{cite book |author1=Rudyard Kipling |author-link1=Rudyard_Kipling |title="The Maltese Cat" |date=1914 |publisher=Doubleday Page & Company |location=Garden City, NY |edition=The Seven Seas Edition of the Works of Rudyard Kipling |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=oVA6AQAAMAAJ&pg=PA231 |access-date=7 July 2019}}</ref> The story is about a [[polo]] match set in [[British Raj|British colonial India]], told from the point of view of one of the ponies, a grey named the Maltese Cat.<ref>{{cite web |last=Wilson |first=Alastair |url=http://www.kipling.org.uk/rg_maltesecat1.htm |title=The Maltese Cat |work=Kipling.org.uk |date=January 30, 2006 |access-date=March 24, 2010}} Notes on and explanation of the story.</ref>

[[Patrick Leigh Fermor]] alludes to this usage in 1986's ''[[Between the Woods and the Water]]'' where, after a game of bicycle polo at a country house on the [[Great Hungarian Plain]], he refers to the bicycles as "Maltese Cats": "The other side won but we scored four goals, and when the iron Maltese Cats were back in their stands, we limped back to the steps, where Countess Denise and&nbsp;... had been leaning on the balustrade like ladies gazing down into the lists."<ref>{{cite book |last=Leigh Fermor |first=Patrick |author-link=Patrick Leigh Fermor |title=Between the Woods and the Water |date=1986 |location=London |publisher=John Murray}}</ref>

[[O. Henry]] alludes to a Maltese cat in his 1908 story [[A Lickpenny Lover]] as being "secretive and wary" when he compares the protagonist - an 18 year old girl Masie - to it.<ref name="Lickpenny">{{cite book |last=Henry |first=O. |author-link=O. Henry |title=A Lickpenny Lover |date=1908 |url= https://americanliterature.com/author/o-henry/short-story/a-lickpenny-lover |via=AmericanLiterature.com |access-date=September 2, 2022}}</ref>

A Maltese cat comes into the kitchen where main character Jim Burden is taking a bath on his first day at his grandparents' Nebraska farm in [[Willa Cather]]'s 1918 novel ''[[My Ántonia]]''.