Like a streak of sunlight she glides along the window-sill and leaps to the ground—while sparrows from the gutter fight for the yellow feather, which the warm summer breeze loosens from her whiskers and bears aloft.
Once in the garden she gets up speed, scurries along the hedge, through into the cornfield, and so along the hedge again.
But why run? No shout or bark breaks the silence ... it does not look as if mankind’s four-legged police have seen her this time!
BOX AND THE RED COMMUNIST
Red became more and more reckless—and the wretched Box, who often saw her from his kennel, suffered the agonies of Tantalus!
His defeat in the manure-well had not reformed the cat-nihilist. He was still in the mood for war, and bent upon taking a bloody revenge.
For two whole weeks he has been chained up—but now the farmer’s wife herself resolved to take him in hand. His constant assaults on all cats, and especially his occasional outbreaks on her own, have for a long time given her great annoyance.
Every day he spends several hours sitting in a basket of hay in the kitchen together with five little newly-born kittens, which crawl squeaking round his legs and body. By this treatment they hope to make him accustomed to cats!
He is watched very closely; the slightest suspicious movement on his part brings a crack on the head from ladle or poker. The little ones also treat him with the utmost disrespect: they hiss at him and spit right in his face!
When the “lesson” is over for the day and he is shut out of the kitchen, his sensitive mind is in such a turmoil that he scarcely knows what he is doing. The most weird things happen: he sees cats everywhere—the sun itself turns into a huge, shining cat-face—and with hair on end and tail between his legs he makes a frantic charge towards it....