“Oh, it takes all kinds of hens to make a barn-yard family!” sighed the rooster.
“I guess they will miss you,” said Mr. Dog, “and the master will, too, for all the hens are likely to run away, with no one to keep them at home.”
“Tommie Cat, we will hear what you have to tell. I bet it will be about a mouse.”
“You win the bet,” said Mr. Tom Cat.
MR. TOM CAT’S STORY
“My story,” said Mr. Tom Cat, “is about a mouse, the only mouse that ever got away from me—that is, the only one that I ever saw. Of course, I did not see the ones that cook thought I should have caught.
“I came to live at the master’s house when I was a very little kitten, and right away I began to catch the mice.
“I have heard it said that my mother and father were the best mousers anywhere around, and I expect I take after them. Anyway, I could catch mice, so I became a great pet in the house.
“And while I always had plenty of milk—and sometimes cream—to eat, I never failed to catch a mouse each night, and sometimes more, for a cat had not lived in the house for years, and those mice thought they owned it until I came.
“They ran about everywhere, on the pantry shelves and all over the rooms at night, and they would even run over me sometimes when I was taking forty winks; but I soon stopped that. I played I was asleep when I wasn’t and caught those silly mice until the others began to learn that I was a thing to be feared and not to be taken as a joke.