Pussy-Cat Town

by Marion Ames Taggart

In the meantime the gentlemen had been arriving, hardly less prompt than the ladies, which is not strange, because it was curiosity that brought them all so early, and cats are the most curious of creatures, the gentlemen just as curious as the ladies among them—wherein they are very different, you know, from human creatures.

Bidelia was busy receiving her guests, and ushering them out to the dining-room, where Madam Laura was pouring catnip tea at the table out of a very big urn indeed. The table was beautifully set with charming saucers and plates of glass and silver, and decorated with bunches of catnip in the centre and at each corner, connected by long loops of sky-blue ribbon. There were thin slices of cold meat, little cakes of puppy biscuits, cut into fancy shapes, crackers, cheese, cream in a large bowl, like a punch-bowl on a side-table, and ice-cream—melted ice-cream, of course, as all sensible people with good, catlike tastes prefer it.

Bidelia had cups for the catnip tea which had come down to her from her greatest of grandmothers, nobody knows how many generations ago, for the cups were nearly a hundred years old, and in a hundred years cats lay by a great length of grandmothers. These cups were small at the bottom and flaring at the top, like little bowls, and they had no handles. They were a grayish china, with dark blue border and little sprigs of dark blue flowers in the bottoms, which the guests could not see until they had lapped up their tea to the last drop.

Dolly Varden handed around tea and the other refreshments. The crowd grew so great that there was not room after awhile to set the cups on the floor. Ever so many were waiting to be served, and one could see from their rising fur that this was annoying them dreadfully.

Tommy Traddles saw this, too, and he whispered to Bidelia.

“Certainly,” she said aloud, and Tommy Traddles turned to the guests.

“Our hostess has provided us with an entertainment, in which I have the honour to be of some assistance, as the master of the Purrington school,” he said. “When you have enjoyed sufficiently the hospitality of this room will you please go out upon the lawn, where the music announced on the cards of invitation will be given.”

The instant Doctor Traddles had finished speaking more than half the guests hastened out on the lawn, anxious to secure the best places to see and hear, for cats do not always behave unselfishly; perhaps they have followed the bad example of human beings, of whom a few are always trying to get the best of everything for themselves.

Here the fond and proud parents found all the kittens of Purrington, little girls and little boys, drawn up in a row, their eyes as bright as they could be, their noses quivering with nervous impatience, and their little tails all straight up in the air above their backs like so many fur-covered slate-pencils. The kittens all wore ribbons crossed under the left foreleg and tied in a bow on the right shoulder. The boys wore pink, the girls blue ribbons, and the scholars who had done well in school had each a little silvered bell tied around the throat by a narrow ribbon, matching in colour the wider one around the shoulder.

The murmurs that arose from the guests on the lawn reached the ears of those remaining in the dining-room, who hastily finished their catnip tea and swallowed their last bites of cold meat and puppy biscuit cakes, lapped the final drops of their ice-cream, and hurried after the ladies and gentlemen on the lawn.