Well, in the first place, if you please, madam, I will answer your question (Yankee fashion) by asking another. Whose cook was it who threw her apron over me, when I was quietly taking a walk in the street one day, and brought me here without saying by-your-leave, for a play-mate for your own little girl? As to the “gold-fish,” I did put my paw on the glass globe, there’s no use denying that, because you peeped into the parlor just as I was doing it; but that does not prove that I wanted to kill and eat them, and if I did, did not you buy a fresh lobster this morning, of the market-man, and tell your cook to boil him, boil him alive? if you kill creatures for your dinner how should a poor little cat be expected to do better?
“Lapped milk out of a pan,” did I? don’t you often, when you pass into a confectioner’s shop, pick up bits of candy and peppermint-drops, and put them in your mouth, while you are wailing to be waited upon? People who live in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones, mistress! As to helping myself “to beefsteak,” if your girl had not kidnapped me, and brought me to this bran-new house, where there is not a sign of a mouse to be had, I would not have been obliged to steal your beefsteak. With regard to “looking in the glass,” the less you say about that, the better.
Where’s the harm if I did want to trim my whiskers a little, and admire my soft white paws, I am not the only person in this house who looks in the glass, I reckon. I also plead guilty to “taking a nap on your velvet sofa,” but I will leave it to any outsider, if I did not look better on it than did the boots of that gentleman who called to see you the other evening, and who certainly ought to know what velvet sofas were intended for.
Yes, and I jumped on your face in the morning too, I am not going to back out of that, but you must recollect that you have a way of sleeping too long in the morning; and that I never can get my breakfast till your ladyship has had yours; as to the headache you say I gave you by doing it, it is my opinion, that the preserves, and hot biscuit, you ate for tea the night before, were answerable for that. But what a fool I am to waste words with a woman who lays down one rule of right for her cat, and another for herself; thank goodness there’s a mouse, the first I’ve seen here, now you’ll see science, or my name is not kitty; keep your old cold beefsteak and welcome, and I will take my first independent meal in this house, off hot mouse, and no thanks to you.
LUCY’S FAULT.
Lucy had long silken golden curls, they fell quite to her waist. Her mother did not “do them up” in paper; her hair curled naturally. Lucy was not proud of her curls; she did not care any thing about them; ladies in the street, often stopped her to look at them: and her little playmates often said, “I wish my hair curled like Lucy’s,” but Lucy always said, “I wish they were off.”
One day Lucy went to her mother, and said: “May I have my curls cut off?”
“No,” said her mother, “I should not like to have them cut; I think it would be a great pity, they are so soft, so long, and so even; your head is always full of notions, run away and play.”
Lucy went away, but she kept thinking about her hair, and wishing her mother would let her have it all cut off, and when Lucy once got her heart set on any thing, she never would be satisfied till she got it.
A few days after, she thought she would try again, so she said, “Mother, if you would only let me go to Mr. Wynne, the barber, and have my hair cut close; may I mother?”