Mammy Tittleback and Her Family A True Story of Seventeen Cats

Excerpt

MAMMY TITTLEBACK
AND HER FAMILY.
I.

Mammy Tittleback is a splendid great tortoise-shell cat,—yellow and black and white; nearly equal parts of each color, except on her tail and her face. Her tail is all black; and her face is white, with only a little black and yellow about the ears and eyes. Her face is a very kind-looking face, but her tail is a fierce one; and when she is angry, she can swell it up in a minute, till it looks almost as big as her body.

Nobody knows where Mammy Tittleback was born, or where she came from. She appeared one morning at Mr. Frank Wellington's, in the town of Mendon in Pennsylvania. Phil and Fred Wellington, Mr. Frank Wellington's boys, liked her looks, and invited her to stay; that is, they gave her all the milk she wanted to drink, and that is the best way to make a cat understand that you want her to live with you. So she stayed, and Phil and Fred named her Mammy Tittleback after a cat they had read about in the "New York Tribune."

Phil and Fred have two cousins who often go to visit them. Their names are Johnny and Rosy Chapman; and if it had not been for Johnny and Rosy Chapman, there would never have been this nice story to tell about Mammy Tittleback: for Phil and Fred are big boys, and do not care very much about cats; they like to see them around, and to make them comfortable; but Johnny and Rosy are quite different. Johnny is only eight and Rosy six, and they love cats and kittens better than anything else in the world; and when they went to spend this last summer at their Uncle Frank Wellington's, and found Mammy Tittleback with six little kittens, just born, they thought such a piece of luck never had happened before to two children.

Juniper and Mousiewary had been born the year before. Phil named these. Juniper was a splendid great fellow, nearly all white. At first he was called "Junior," but they changed it afterward to "Juniper," because, as Phil said, they didn't know what his father's name was, and there wasn't any sense in calling him "Junior," and, besides, "Juniper" sounded better.

Mousiewary was white, with a black and yellow head. Phil called her "Mousiewary" because she would lie still so long watching for a mouse. She was a year and a half old when Johnny and Rosy went to their Uncle Frank's for this visit, and she had two little kittens of her own that could just run about. They were wild little things, and very fierce, so Phil had called them the Imps. But Johnny and Rosy soon got them so tame that this name did not suit them any longer, and then they named them over again "Beauty" and "Clover."

Mammy Tittleback's second family of kittens were born in the barn, on the hay. After a while she moved them into an old wagon that was not used. This was very clever of her, because they could not get out of the wagon and run away. But pretty soon she moved them again, to a place which the children did not approve of at all; it was a sort of hollow in the ground, under a great pile of fence rails that were lying near the cowshed.