“A bird came to live in our house. It lived in a cage high on the wall. The boy showed me the bird and looked at me hard, and lifted up his finger and said, ‘Tabby Furpurr, don’t you touch that bird. That bird is not for you. Don’t you touch that bird!‘
“I did not mean to do anything to that bird. But it kept moving and hopping, and shaking its wings, and shaking its tail, and it made me look at it; and one day when it shook itself very much I looked at it a long time and at last I jumped at it. Before I knew what I was going to do I jumped at it, and the cage fell down. I could not get the bird. He kept himself in a corner.
“The boy’s dog barked and ran to tell the people something was the matter, and they all came and spoke loud and held up their fingers and cried ‘Shame! Shame!’
“I went over to the grandma house and hid under a bed and stayed till I was almost starved. Then I crawled out and put my paw on grandma’s foot, and looked up in her face and she gave me some milk, and let me warm me at her fire.
The Rat That Fought the Duck.
“Something happened to her duck. It let its little ducks go with it under the bridge to the pond, and it got itself killed. There was a rat there, and it was going to get one of her little ducks, and she began to fight the rat, and the mother rat came out and helped fight the duck, and the boy drove them away, but afterwards the duck died and left the little ducks.
“But grandma had a barn cat. She was not a Tabby. She was only a black-and-white cat, but she was a very good cat. She never would touch a bird or a chicken, and she never would suck an egg. She did not like me. She would not let me come in her barn. I did not let her come in my barn. She was a good cat for not liking birds.
“The boy carried the little ducks to the barn and tried to make a hen that was there take care of them. She would not do that. She went and left them. She would not scratch up worms for them. The other ducks would not. They had to take care of their own children, and these little ducks stayed all alone by themselves, and cried for their mother.
“Now that barn cat, though she was only a black and white cat and not a Tabby, sat down there with the little ducks and took care of them. Every day she went there and stayed with the ducks, and when they went into a puddle she mewed for them to come back.