“Sleeping in barns, and running down in store cellars isn’t good for a cat’s fur,” thought Blackie, as she saw how ruffled hers was. “I must give myself a good cleaning before I go back home, or the children will not know me.”
So Blackie stayed in the field and washed herself with her red tongue. Then she crept up behind a house and found a piece of fish the farmer’s wife had thrown out. It was not as nice fish as Blackie used to get in her own home, but she could find no better.
“Never mind,” said the black cat to herself, “I’ll soon be where I belong, and I’ll never run away again. I’m going home.”
So Blackie started to go to her home. But she found the same trouble she had found in trying to get back to Mrs. Thompson. Blackie was so far away from her home with the good children that she could not find it. Up and down, here and there, she wandered for several days, but she could not find her home.
“Oh, dear!” Blackie exclaimed one day, when, all tired out, and hungry and thirsty she lay down in the grass to rest. “Oh, dear! I’m lost! That’s all there is about it! I don’t know where my home is, and I’m lost! I wonder what I had better do?”
Blackie was all alone. There was no one to tell her what to do, so she had to think it out for herself.
“Let me see now,” she said. “Even though I am lost I must have something to eat and drink, and a place to sleep. I think I had better go to some house and see if they will take me in.
“If they will, perhaps they will keep me for a while, until I get fat again, and feel better, and then I can find my own home. Yes, that is what I’ll do. I’ve wandered around enough. I’ll go to some house, and mew. They’ll know that I’m hungry and feed me.”
Blackie walked out of the field to the road, and down that toward a big, white farmhouse. It looked so nice and clean that Blackie thought surely it would be a good home for her.
“I’ll go around to the kitchen door,” thought Blackie. “That is where there will be something to eat.”