University of Virginia Library

TWENTY-NINE CATS.

“Scat!” screamed Mrs. Partington, from the head
of the stairs, as the noise of an interesting quadruped of
the cat species in the kitchen below met her ears
“Scat! I say!”

She listened to ascertain the result of her command;
but the noise was resumed, and the little kitchen echoed
again with the feline music, — spitting, and mewing, and
growling with the concatenation of malignity in every
note of it that reached her as she leaned over the banister.

“Gracious Heaven!” cried she, “I should think
there was twenty of 'em; what shall I do? Scat!”
she screamed again, and the noise redoubled; indeed, it
appeared to her excited fancy that a reinforcement had
arrived, and were all in full chorus, and now the crash
of crockery added to her fear. She dared not go down,
for, of all things in the world, she feared a spiteful cat.
It became suddenly still in a moment or so, and she
ventured down stairs. A broken plate was on the floor,
with traces of molasses upon the fragments, and Ike
very demurely sat behind the stove, counting his marbles.

“Has there been any cats in here, Isaac?” said the
kind old lady, looking anxiously round the room.

“Twenty-seven, twenty-eight, twenty-nine”—

“Where, for goodness sake, did twenty-nine cats come

from?” asked she; “but I knowed there was a good
many of 'em.”

“And there 's a twoser,” continued Ike, still counting,
“and a Chinese.”

“Anything like the Maltees, Isaac?” inquired she.

“I mean marbles, aunt,” said Ike.

“And I mean cats, Isaac,” said Mrs. Partington, severely.

It was a scene for a painter, — Coffin should do it
up, — her eyes alternated between the broken plate and
the boy, as if pondering the mystery of the sounds she
had heard, and Ike wiped the molasses from his mouth
on his sleeve. Did n't the molasses on the plate explain
it? He had to take a lecture, you may depend, on the
certainty of roguish boys being awfully punished for
plaguing the aged, and he had to read the story aloud,
before he went to bed that night, of the boys who were
eaten up by the she-bears.

A coach containing a young man and woman with
one trunk on behind, — behind the coach is meant, — is
pleasingly suggestive of matrimony.

“Yes,” says old Roger, sardonically, “but a half
dozen young ones and seven bandboxes are much more
suggestive, — there 's no mistaking signs like those.”