"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.