Excerpt
Too Clever by Half "TELL us a story, mother," said the youngest kitten but three.
"You've heard all my stories," said the mother cat, sleepily turning over in the hay.
"Then make a new one," said the youngest kitten, so pertly that Mrs. Buff boxed her ears at once—but she laughed too. Did you ever hear a cat laugh? People say that cats often have occasion to do it.
"I do know one story," she said; "but I'm not sure that it's true, though it was told me by a most respectable brindled gentleman, a great friend of my dear mother's. He said he was a second cousin twenty-nine times removed of Mrs. Tabby White, the lady the story is about."
"Oh, do tell it," said all the kittens, sitting up very straight and looking at their mother with green anxious eyes.
"Very well," she said kindly; "only if you interrupt I shall leave off."
So there was silence in the barn, except for Mrs. Buff's voice and the soft sound of pleased purring which the kittens made as they listened to the enchanting tale.
"Mrs. Tabby White seems to have been as clever a cat as ever went rat-catching in a pair of soft-soled shoes. She always knew just where a mouse would peep out of the wainscot, and she had her soft-sharp paw on him before he had time to know that he was not alone in the room. She knew how to catch nice breakfasts for herself and her children, a trick I will teach you, my dears, when the spring comes; she used to lie quite quietly among the ivy on the wall, and then take the baby birds out of the nest when the grown-up birds had gone to the grub-shop. Mrs. Tabby White was very clever, as I said—so clever that presently she was not satisfied with being at the very top of the cat profession.
"'Cat-people have more sense than human people, of course,' she said to herself; 'but still there are some things one might learn from them. I must watch and see how they do things.'
"So next morning when the cook gave Mrs. Tabby White her breakfast, she noticed that cook poured the milk out of a jug into a saucer. That afternoon Tabby felt thirsty, but instead of putting her head into the jug and drinking in the usual way,—you know—she tilted up the jug to pour the milk out as she had seen the cook do. But cats' paws, though they are so strong to catch rats and mice and birds, are too weak to hold big brown jugs. The nasty deceitful jug fell off the dresser and broke itself. 'Just to spite me, I do believe,' said Mrs. Tabby. And the milk was all spilled.
"Now how on earth could that jug have been broken?' said cook, when she came in.
"'It must have been the cat,' said the kitchenmaid; and she was quite right, but nobody believed her.
"Then Mrs. Tabby White noticed that human people slept in big soft-cushioned white beds, instead of sleeping on the kitchen hearth-rug, or in the barn, like cat people. So she said to her children one evening—
"'My dears, we are going to move into a new house.'
"And the kittens were delighted, and they all went upstairs very quietly, and crept into the very best human bed....