There was no milk for me--no heads and tails of fish--no sc.r.a.ps of meat--no delicious unforeseen morsels of b.u.t.ter.
The elephant was very kind to me. He had once had a friend exactly like me, he explained, but had unfortunately walked upon him, and now I had come to fill the vacant place in his large heart.
I resolved at once that he should not walk upon me; but in order to insure this, I was compelled to enter upon a more active existence than I had ever known.
When I asked what I was expected to eat, he said--
"Mice, I suppose; or you can have some of my buns if you like. You might like them at first, but you will soon get tired of them."
But I couldn"t eat buns. I was never, from a kitten, fond of such things. I got very hungry. Again and again the mice rushed through the straw, and I, heavily, helplessly, in my unpractised way, rushed after them. At first the elephant laughed heartily at my inexpertness; but when he saw how hungry and wretched I was, he said--
"They won"t give you any milk, and if they find you don"t catch the mice they will take you away from me. Now you are a nice little cat, and I don"t want to part with you. We must try and arrange something."
Then the great thought of my life came to me.
"You walked on the other cat," I said.
"What?" he trumpeted in a voice of thunder.
"I beg your pardon," I said hastily; "I didn"t mean to hurt your feelings"--and, indeed, I could not have imagined that an elephant would have been so thin-skinned "but a great idea has come to me. Why shouldn"t you walk on mice--not too hard, but just so that I could eat them afterwards?"
"Well," said the elephant, showing his long tusks in a smile, "you are not very handsome, and you are not very brisk; but you certainly have brains, my dear."
He dropped his great foot as he spoke. When he lifted it, there lay a mouse. I had an excellent supper; and before the week"s end I heard the keeper say, "This cat has certainly done the trick. She has kept the mice down. We must keep her."
They have kept me. They even go so far as to allow me to moisten my mice with milk.
There is no moral to this story, except that you should do as you are told, and learn everything you can while you are young. It is true that I get on very well without having done so, but then you may not have my good luck. It is not every cat who can get an elephant to catch her mice for her.
A Silly Question
"HOW do you come to be white, when all your brothers are tabby, my dear?" Dolly asked her kitten. As she spoke, she took it away from the ball it was playing with, and held it up and looked in its face as Alice did with the Red Queen.
"I"ll tell you, if you"ll keep it a secret, and not hold me so tight,"
the kitten answered.
Dolly was not surprised to hear the kitten speak, for she had read her fairy books, as all good children should, and she knew that all creatures answer if one only speaks to them properly. So she held the kitten more comfortably and the tale began.
"You must know, my dear Dolly," the kitten began--and Dolly thought it dreadfully familiar--"you must know that when we were very small we all set out to seek our fortunes."
"Why," interrupted Dolly, "you were all born and brought up in our barn!
I used to see you every day."
"Quite so," said the kitten; "we sought our fortune every night, and it turned out to be mice, mostly. Well, one night I was seeking mine, when I came to a hole in the door that I had never noticed before. I crept through it, and found myself in a beautiful large room. It smelt delicious. There was cheese there, and fish, and cream, and mice, and milk. It was the most lovely room you can think of."
"There"s no such room----" began Dolly.
"Did I say there was?" asked the kitten. "I only said I found myself there. Well, I stayed there some time. It was the happiest hour of my life. But, as I was washing my face after one of the most delicious herring"s heads you ever tasted, I noticed that on nails all round the room were hung skins--and they were cat skins," it added slowly. "Well may you tremble!"
Dolly hadn"t trembled. She had only shaken the kitten to make it speak faster.
"Well, I stood there rooted to the ground with horror; and then came a sort of horrible scramble-rush, and a barking and squeaking, and a terrible monster stood before me. It was something like a dog and something like a broom, something like being thrown out of the larder by cook--I can"t describe it. It caught me up, and in less than a moment it had hung my tabby skin on a nail behind the door.
"I crept out of that lovely fairyland a cat without a skin. And that"s how I came to be white."
"I don"t quite see----" began Dolly.
"No? Why, what would your mother do if some one took off your dress, and hung it on a nail where she could not get it?"
"Buy me another, I suppose."
"Exactly. But when my mother took me to the cat-skin shop, they were, unfortunately, quite out of tabby dresses in my size, so I had to have a white one."
"I don"t believe a word of it," said Dolly.
"No? Well, I"m sure it"s as good a story as you could expect in answer to such a silly question."
"But you were always----"
"Oh, well!" said the kitten, showing its claws, "if you know more about it than I do, of course there"s no more to be said. Perhaps you could tell me why your hair is brown?"
"I was born so, I believe," said Dolly gently.
The kitten put its nose in the air.
"You"ve got no imagination," it said.
"But, Kitty, really and truly, without pretending, you _were_ born white, you know."
"If you know all about it, why did you ask me? At any rate, you can"t expect me to remember whether I was born white or not. I was too young to notice such things."
"Now you are in fun," said poor Dolly, bewildered.
The kitten bristled with indignation.
"What! you really don"t believe me? I"ll never speak to you again," it said. And it never has.
The Selfish p.u.s.s.y