Through the association of ideas, a given concept turns into a dramatic event, such as the perennial wonder of the Dead-Cat-Come-to-Justice. A New York City newspaperman once decided to track down this tale. He had first heard it from a friend. Claiming to believe the story himself, the friend told the newspaperman about a woman who had placed her pet cat in a vetrinary hospital where it later died. As she wished to give the animal a decent burial, the woman called for her pet's remains; and neatly wrapped in a box she received the dead cat.

Along the way home, the woman stopped to do some shopping at Stern's department store on 42nd Street. While selecting her purchases, the woman placed the box on a near-by counter. But suddenly she looked around for it, and the box was gone.

Stern's detectives began searching the store for the packaged body of the cat. Within a short time they found it. The opened box, the deceased animal leering out of it, was on the floor of a telephone booth. Alongside there lay the body of a woman, immediately identified as a well-known shoplifter who had been under the scrutiny of this and other stores for several months. The shoplifter had apparently taken her loot to the telephone booth, opened it, caught a glimpse of the dead cat, and dropped to the floor dead of a heart attack resulting from fright.

His friend, the newspaperman learned, got the rumor about this macabre justice from two actors who lived in the neighboring apartment. The two knew the full truth of the story, according to the friend. Yet, interviewing the actors, the journalist found they had received the tale from a Christian Science practitioner, a man whose word they did not doubt as he had told them the rumor as gospel.

The Christian Science practitioner willingly repeated this gospel before the newspaperman, adding that he had heard it from a woman. She was the friend of the dead cat's owner. She would give him the names of all the people involved.

And, to be sure, this woman was full of the dead-cat wonder, according to the journalist . . .

Not that she actually knew the name of the animal's owner. But she had heard the rumor from her son-in-law, who knew all about it. "He turned out to know everything about it," the newspaperman reported. "He had heard the story firsthand from a passenger on a commuters' train whose aunt knew the lady who owned the dead cat."

Still curious about the rumor, the newspaperman went to Stern's department store. There a somewhat firm, if not angered, chief detective swiftly assured him that nothing of the sort had happened. Neither had the local police station any record of either a dead shoplifter or a dead cat having been reported.

While the newspaperman was playing ring-around-a-rosy with the Dead-Cat-Come-to-Justice rumor, it was having a gay time of its own. It was flying from table to table, from office to office on its cross-country journey. Readjusted to fit the local situation in Chicago, the rumor was an eye-opener, months later, when it became current talk. In California, the following year, people gasped in amazement as they heard about the fate of the shoplifter in the local department store. And at least one national magazine published the rumor as one of its truth-is-stranger-than-fiction features for the edification of the wonder-lovers among its loyal subscribers.