Little Mitchell: The Story of a Mountain Squirrel

by Margaret Warner Morley

The gentleman wondered what it was all about, and watched them without their knowing it. Grandma led Lady Ann up the long hill back of the house to an old barn, way off where hay was stored. Into this barn they went, and in a nice soft bed of hay Jack and Hallet were born; and not a word did these two conspirators say to their human friends about the two handsome kits up in the old hay barn.

But when the kittens were half grown,—too big to disappear, you know,—their mother proudly took them home and showed them to the gentleman and his wife, who were also very proud of them, they were so handsome.

Well, they were Jack and Hallet, and they lived to be old and very well behaved cats, and they were always handsome. Little Goliah was Grandma’s own child; but he never was much of a kit, for Grandma was very old—that is, old for a cat—when he was born. She hid him away until he was a big kit, for she wanted to save him from disappearing; and because he was her youngest he was also her favorite. Even after he was grown up, she would wash his face and brush his coat with her rough tongue. She treated him as though he were a little kitten until she died of old age.

And Goliah was always a weak kit, and not nearly as large nor as handsome as the others, and not so very wise. But the gentleman’s wife took the best of care of him for Grandma’s sake.

The very funniest, cunningest thing Grandma ever did was to bring the kit that sat on the sticky fly-paper to her mistress. This happened before Grandma got to be so old. The kitten was very young, and it was her grandchild, the child of her daughter Sue.

One day the little fuzzy kit sat down on the sticky fly-paper that the girls who worked in the kitchen had left lying around. They had been forbidden to use it, for fear a kit might sit on it; and how they got the fly-paper anyway is a mystery. For the gentleman and his wife had built their pretty log-house away out in the mountains, thirty or forty miles from a railroad, and there were no shops in the mountains where one could go to buy things.

Probably the fly-paper had been sent by mistake with the things ordered from the far-away big city. Things were always being sent by mistake.

So the kit sat down on the fly-paper. Then it rolled over on it, trying to get loose.

The girls took it up as soon as they saw it, but it was a dreadful-looking kitten by the time they got it free. Its fur was all stuck together, and its paws and its ears and everything were terribly stuck up.