Mammy Tittleback and Her Family Part 4

"I won't tell," said Johnny, "but I know."

"Juniper, he ran away. He'll take care of himself. He used to come back once in a while. We'd see him round the barn. Mousiewary, she comes sometimes now; I saw her the other day. She's real smart."

"Well, old Mammy t.i.ttleback's the best of 'em all," said Phil, catching her up and trying to make her snuggle down in his lap. But Mammy t.i.ttleback did not like to be held. She wriggled away, jumped down, and walked restlessly toward the kitchen door. Phil followed, opened the door, and let her go out. "She won't let you pet her," he said; "she's a real business cat, she always was. She likes to stay in the barn and hunt rats better than anything in the world, except when it's so cold she can't."

"She used to let me hold her sometimes in the summer," said Rosy.

"Oh, that was different. She had to be staying round then, doing nothing, to look after the kittens," replied Phil. "She wasn't wasting any time then being held, but she won't let you hold her now more 'n two or three minutes at a time. She jumps right down, and goes off as if she was sent for."

After the children had gone to bed, Mrs. Chapman told us a very droll part of the history of the cats' journey,--what might be called the sequel to it. The Democrats were not the only people in the village who took offence at the sight of the cats. There is a Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals in Burnet, and some of the people who belonged to this society, when they heard of the affair, took it into their heads that Mr. Frank Wellington had done a very cruel thing in shutting so many cats up in a box together. It was a very good ill.u.s.tration of the way stories grow big in many times telling, the way the number of those cats went on growing bigger and bigger every time the story was told. At last they got it up as high as forty-five; and there really were some people in town who believed that forty-five cats had come from Mendon to Burnet in that box. "Jerry says they haven't ever had it lower than twenty-five," said Mrs. Chapman. "It runs all the way from forty-five to twenty-five, but twenty-five is the lowest, and there was one man in the town who really did threaten pretty seriously to enter a complaint against Frank Wellington with the society, but I guess he was laughed out of it. It is almost a pity he didn't do it, it would have been such a joke all round."

This is all I have to tell you about Mammy t.i.ttleback and her family now. When I go back to Burnet next summer, I hope I shall find her with six more little kittens, and Johnny and Rosy as happy with them as they were with Spitfire, Blacky, Coaley, Limbab, Lily, and Gregory Second.

THE END.