Naturally, the subtitle says it all...
“Giving An Account of an Old Miserable Woman, who lately kept a blind ale-house, in St. Tooley-Streat, near the Burrough of Southwark; who was so wretchedly covetous, as to deny her self the common benefits of life, as to meat and cloaths; leaving, at her death, about fifteen hundred pounds, to her cat, using to say often, when the cat mow’d:
“Peace Puss, peace:
Thou Shalt have All, when I am Dead.’”
As the story goes, for years, this "mean" woman did not spend her money, preferring to keep her alehouse earnings to herself.
Finally, when no one had seen her for a while, one of her neighbors went in to check on her:
He found the Rich Old Woman dead:
And, looking in a truk just by,
Near Eighteen Hundred Pounds did lie.
No sooner he had found the hoard,
But he divulg’d it all abroad:
Then shockt the neighbours, to behold,
The Treasur’d bags of coyned gold.
Thus did she cheat the battle such,
They thought her poor; for she was rich:
Her belly saved it for her CAT,
But Puss must shew the will for that."
Not crazy though, right?