Mouser Cats Story | Page 8

she came home, she looked so queer; but you couldn't have made her believe it. She thought she was a perfect beauty, and when she came over to this farm that evening, Mr. Thomas Cat said to her:
"'Why you are a perfect sight, that's what you are, with those tufts of black hair all over you!'
"'That's all the style,' Mrs. Pussy Cat said, and I think she really believed that she was as handsome as any cat you could find.
"Well, things went along all right while the weather was warm, but in the course of ten days we had a heavy frost, and dear me, dear me, how cold it grew all of a sudden! Poor Mrs. Pussy Cat was almost frozen to death the first night of the cold snap, when she tried to stay with the rest of us to a concert, and went home moaning:
"'Oh, give me back my hair! Give me back my hair!'
[Illustration: Mrs. Pussy Cat in Style.]
"Of course that couldn't be done, because she had to wait for it to grow again; but Mrs. Man on the next farm wrapped her up in an old shawl, and she had to stay in a basket until her hair grew, else she'd have frozen to death, for we had a terrible hard winter that season. When the hair did come out it was uneven, of course, and she was the worst looking cat you ever saw.
"Mr. Man was shaving the first morning Mrs. Pussy Cat came out of the basket, and he hadn't seen her since she had been to the barber's.
[Illustration: Mr. Man is Disturbed.]
"She jumped up on a chair by the side of him, thinking he would stroke her fur as he always used to do, when the poor man got one glimpse of her, and it nearly scared him into hysterics. I suppose he thought it was a ghost, or something like that, for she looked bad enough to be almost anything.
"He gave a yell, and jumped in the air. That scared Mrs. Pussy Cat, and she screamed as she leaped out of the chair. Then Mr. Man went after her with that big razor in his hand.
"I don't know how far he chased her; but Mr. Towser said that Mrs. Pussy Cat ran more than five miles before she stopped, and when she sneaked back home that night, I'm thinking she felt a good deal as Mr. Crow did when he tried to make folks believe peacock feathers were growing in his tail."

MR. CROW'S DECEIT.
"I have heard a great many stories which Mr. Crow has told; but never one about him," your Aunt Amy interrupted. "If he tried to deceive the other birds, I surely would like to know about it."
"Well, he did," Mrs. Mouser Cat said emphatically, sitting bolt upright; "but of course he doesn't like to have the story told, so I had rather you wouldn't let him know I mentioned it.
"I don't know how he happened to get it into his head to do such a thing, for, as a rule, he spends the most of his time over in the big tree telling stories or making poetry; but he grew foolish once, and whenever anybody came where he was, he said he had strange growing feathers, and the doctor believed he was turning into a peacock.
"Of course that made a good deal of excitement around here, among all of us, for it would be a strange thing for a crow to change in that way, and he had twice as many visitors as he ever had before, all wanting to know about the new feathers.
"Well, of course he couldn't keep saying that they were coming, and not show any signs of them, so one day he said he felt terribly sick and guessed he should go into the hospital. Then we didn't see anything of him for most a week, until little Redder Squirrel came around and said Mr. Crow was all right; that he had as many as six peacock feathers growing right out of his tail.
"Well, now, you can believe we were astonished, and more excited over it than we had been since young Mr. Thomas Cat painted the canary yellow. Of course we asked Redder Squirrel where we could see him, and he said Mr. Crow had agreed to come out on the hill, just under the tree, that afternoon.
"If we animals around here were anxious to see him, you can guess that the peacocks were just about wild, and when the time came for Mr. Crow to show himself, all the peacocks for as many as five miles around were gathered under the big tree. Mr. Crow didn't know anything about their coming, until he marched right out in the midst of them.
[Illustration: Mr.