When You Were a Boy

by Edwin L. Sabin

In a soap-box with slats across the front wrathfully crouched Lunt’s gaunt gray Thomas-cat, who had been rudely awakened from a matutinal slumber in the Lunt cellar and ignominiously confined. At regular intervals he uttered an appealing, protesting “Yow!” while he glared through his bars.

Next to him was Hen’s red “bantie,” also in a soap-box, but more composed.

Then came Don, for whom no cage procurable was ample enough; so he was tied to a nail, which afforded him liberty to fawn impartially upon old and young, and occasionally to make frantic endeavors to reach you in the dressing-room.

Next to him was Snap, the Kemps’ black-and-tan, miserable in close quarters; and at the end of the row, quaking in abject terror over the proximity of so many enemies, were Fat’s precious white rats.

“Is that all the m’nag’rie you kids got? Aw, gee!” sneered the invidious boys among the spectators.

“It’s more’n you got, anyhow!” you and Hen retorted from your covert.

“Don’t you touch those rats!” commanded Fat, with a jealous eye out for meddling fingers. “They’re my rats.”

It was very hard restraining the members of the troupe in their quarters until time was ripe. Fat, his face streaked in red and white water-colors, and wearing a costume devised by his mother from large-figured calico, was wild to exhibit himself; and Snoopie, bursting with prowess, demanded careful watching or he would anticipate the program.

“Stay in here, darn you! You’ve all got to wait till the ringmaster says to come.”